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Copyright 2009 by Marguerite H. Rippy

All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
12 11 10 09

4 3 2 1

Ai Que Saudades Da Amelia (aka: Amelia) by Ataulpho Alves and Mario Lago. Published and controlled
by Irmaos Vitale. Administered by Peer International
Corporation. International copyright secured. Used by
permission. All rights reserved.
Lyrics from Praa Onze (samba), by Sebastio Bernardes de Souza Prata (Grande Otelo) and Herivelto de
Oliveira Martins (Herivelto Martins). Copyright 1941
by Mangione, Filhos & Cia Ltda. All rights reserved for
all countries of the world.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rippy, Marguerite H., 1967
Orson Welles and the unnished RKO projects : a postmodern perspective / Marguerite H. Rippy.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8093-2912-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8093-2912-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Welles, Orson, 19151985Criticism and interpretation. 2. RKO Radio Pictures, inc. I. Title.
PN1998.3.W45R57 2009
791.4302'33092dc22
2008038163
Printed on recycled paper.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum
requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed
Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1992.

Disclaimer:
Some WH[W in the original version of this book LVnot
available for inclusion in the eBook.

To Merrill, for creating both a beginning and an end

2^]cT]cb
List of Figures ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: A Postmodern Auteur?
Approaches to the Unnished Wellesian Works 1
1. Origins of the First-Person Singular: Mercurial Theatre on the Air 14
2. Classics for the Masses: Dickens and Welles 46
3. Exploiters in Surroundings Not Healthy for a
White Man: Primitivism and the Identity Detour 68
4. R Is for Real: Documentary Fiction in Its All True 109
Afterword: Wellesian LegaciesWhat, If Anything, Do Mel Gibson,
Stephen Colbert, and Steven Spielberg Have in Common? 142
Notes 173
Bibliography 207
Index 215

5XVdaTb
Following page 108
1. Welles in a promotional photo for Heart of Darkness
2. Welles in makeup for Heart of Darkness
3. Jack Carter and Edna Thomas as the Macbeths
4. Welles in a publicity still for the Rio project
5. Welles and Jiminy Cricket promoting the Lady Esther CBS radio series
6. Photographic still from Its All True
7. Welles with a Brazilian crowd
8. Jangadeiros for the Four Men on a Raft section of Its All True
9. Jangadeiros at Iracema
10. Grande Othelo cooking
11. Welles arriving in Brazil

ix

0RZ]^f[TSV\T]cb
I rst saw Citizen Kane in the now-defunct Key Theatre in Washington,
D.C., and I am happy to say I skipped out of work early to go see it. It made a
strong impression on me, enough so that when I visited the Lilly Library in
Bloomington, Indiana, on a shing expedition for another project, I made
sure to take a look at the Welles Manuscripts. I could not believe the richness
of materials related to Welless RKO years, particularly all the projects that
never made it into theaters. When I mentioned the amount of information
on Welless unnished projects to my mother, she blithely said, Thats a book
waiting to happen. That made it sound like this project was inevitable, a gift
my mother had for duping me into serious work. I also believe that as old theaters like the Key disappear, the next generation of lm scholars is far more
likely to see Welless work in fragmentary form, on DVDs, on the Internet,
and in media forms that I can only imagine. This book reects that belief, and
I hope the next generation of lm scholars will be able to love the old forms
of cinema even as they discover new modes of media entertainment.
Projects like this simply cannot happen without nancial support, and
this book was generously supported by two Lilly Library Helm Fellowships, several grants from the Marymount University Faculty Development
Committee, a Maurice Mednick Fellowship from the Virginia Foundation
for Independent Colleges, and a We the People Grant from the National
Endowment for the Humanities. I am deeply indebted to the gracious hospitality and formidable knowledge of the librarians at the Lilly Library and
the Special Collections of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. In particular, Kathleen Dow, Peggy Daub, Sarah Rentz, and Breon Mitchell were
very helpful in granting permission to publish excerpts and helping prepare
images from the archives. Karl Kage, Wayne Larsen, Kristine Priddy, and
Barb Martin of Southern Illinois University Press provided valued support
and comments that greatly improved the nal product as well.
At every stage of the writing process, I was given excellent feedback from a
variety of colleagues and friends. The conversations I had with Sherri Smith,
Doug Mao, Daniel Bernardi, Courtney Lehmann, and Frank Chorba about
the project were as illuminating and rewarding as the research itself. My
deepest thanks to Scott Newstok and Dudley Andrew for inviting me to join
xi

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

the Transnational Welles conference at Yale University in 2006, where my

conversations with Michael Anderegg, Catherine Benamou, Leslie Weisman,
and James Naremorewho had already deepened my love of cinema studies
as a graduate studentand others helped rene my ideas and expand my
knowledge of Welles. My writing group of Janine DeWitt, Carolyn Oxenford,
Jacquelyn Porter, Barbara Kinney, and Marcia Dursi helped me rephrase
my argument at several junctures to reach a broader audience, and Ulrich
Knoepmacher and John Glavin oered timely feedback on chapter 2 in
particular. I greatly miss the astute comments of the late Mary Lane on both
writing and teaching, and one could not have asked for a better mentor in
all things than Stephen Watt.
I feel fortunate to work as part of a department that cares deeply for each
other and oers the collegiality that helps one in every aspect of life. Sean
Hoare, well known in my department as the best editor around, read over
several chapters with patience and insight. Lillian Bisson, George McLoone,
Susan Fay, Susan Heumann, Nyla Carney, Rosemary Hubbard, Tonya Howe,
Laura Valdez-Pagliaro, and Karen Waters were always ready with supportive
comments and a glass of wine when needed. In addition, the manuscript
beneted at every phase from the assistance of graduate students, including
Andrea Rutan, Galina Palyvian, Emily Dewey, Katharine Torrey, A. Michelle
Bolger, Megan Devers, Jennifer Elena, Rebecca Gibbs Jones, Snezana Pavlovic, and Mary Nyingi. Many other colleagues and friends oered support
and ideas as well along the way, including Teresa Reed, Brian Doyle, Meg
Mulrooney, Chris Snyder, Hazel Sirett, and Norah Falcon.
Of course family pays the greatest price for a project like this, and I am
blessed to be part of an unerringly supportive, if eccentric, clan. All the Rippys, including both Conrads, Felix, and my parents, Merrill and Frances, are
woven deeply into the pages of this book. Conrad Mayhew even helped with
nal edits and copyright permissions, as well as nding Caf Rosso when
I needed it most. I cannot believe the patience of Rick, Hobie, K.K., and
Merrill during my years of research. They acted like its perfectly normal to
spend weekends curled up around the computer, and they knew just when
to insist I pull away and go on a walk as well. For both walks and patience,
I am grateful.

xii

>ab^]FT[[TbP]ScWTD]UX]XbWTSA:>?a^YTRcb

8]ca^SdRcX^]
A Postmodern Auteur? Approaches to
the Unfinished Wellesian Works
In 1999 a group of scholars gathered in Mlaga, Spain, for the centenary
Shakespeare on Screen conference. The shadow of Orson Welles loomed
large over the meeting, since no other American director has experimented
with adapting the Bard as often or as interestingly as Welles. As scholars, we
dissected the work of Welles with typical rational distance and discernment.
Then we boarded a bus for Ronda, where Welles is buried, and proceeded
to unravel into a hoard of camera-clicking tourists, jockeying for position
around Welless grave on a private estate, agog at our own disheveled, sweaty
proximity to an American Bard.
Our behavior points out a countermovement, or perhaps really a crosscurrent, to the recent antiauteurist vein of cinema and media studies, articulated
by Krin Gabbard as a centrifugal force away from canonical directors and
the old Hollywood.1 For although academe can proclaim the decline of the
auteur, star directors like Steven Spielberg still dominate commercial cinema,
as well as generating course enrollment and textbook sales. The capitalist
structure of commercial lm demands a star to be recognized as author or
key performer within what are undeniably collective works in order for the
mechanisms of commercial promotion and payment to function smoothly.
As cinema and media studies scholars, we must continue to consider the
role of the star persona even while we look through poststructural lenses.
Star director has a slightly dierent nuance than auteur in that the former
term emphasizes the nancial importance of the director over the artistic
power, and thinking in terms of moviemaking as an industry as well as an
art acknowledges the role of directors without overly privileging their roles
in production.

INTRODUCTION

Part of the goal of this book is to reconcile what have traditionally been
labeled opposing strands of cinema and media studies: auteur theory on the
one hand and the post theory approaches like feminism, identity theory,
critical race theory, and narrative deconstruction on the other. As cinema
and media studies matures, we need to integrate the study of canonical auteurs like Welles into the posttheory world, and when we do, we are likely to
nd that they are not as autocratic as we once thought; that it was, in fact,
our way of studying their bodies of work and modes of production that were
restrictive. This is particularly true of Welles, who seduces us into studying
of the cult of personalityand while this danger exists to an extent in the
study of any artist, there are few artists who engage so actively, charmingly,
and eectively in the production (and deconstruction) of their own public
personas. Welles is often regarded as a quintessential modernist auteur, but
his working process ts just as comfortably within what are often labeled
postmodern modes of productionpastiche, collage, incompletion, selfreferentiality, and multimedia experimentation. In fact, as new media forms
such as YouTube and the DVD extra emerge, Welless unnished works
and media ephemera become increasingly accessible to mainstream viewers,
who can get to know him both from his YouTube outtakes and from lms
like Citizen Kane.
As these media forms evolve, we are better able to see Welles in his full
complexity, to integrate his commercial personality and his art with their
contexts, and to see his work as a process, rather than as the fragmentary
bits and pieces of commercially released products. Welles produced more
unnished than nished works, and these works are equal in complexity to his commercially marketed products in lm and radio; in fact, they
call into question the very category of nished performances. There are
so many of these unnished works that I found it necessary to limit my
eld of study to only the rst phase of Welless cinema career, his years with
RKO. Looking at Welless unnished RKO projects rather than just at
the distributed lms helps to contextualize not only Welless work but also
the evolution of mass media performance within mid-twentieth-century
American culture. Ultimately, this book aims to establish that these projects
were neither failed nor unnished other than in the eyes of commercial
expectations of their era.
The RKO projects that were shelved by the studio or by Welles himself
demand an approach that embraces rather than resists textual ambiguity, an
alternative to the two dominant approaches to the study of American lm
directors, auteurism and genre studies. When faced with the incomplete
texts, critics have tended traditionally to focus on questions of intentional

INTRODUCTION

itywhat did Welles intend for these lms to look like? How could we piece
them together to best reect his authorial intentions? Instead, I emphasize
the postmodern aspects of Welless unnished work as a rich eld for cultural
analysis in and of themselves. His use of multiple performance modes and
self-critique within these works makes them ripe for rediscovery through
new media forms such as the interactive format of the DVD or the spontaneous, fragmented, viewing environment of Internet sites. As outtakes, variant
scripts, trailers, promotional materials, and clips of his unnished works
become available to viewers, we develop new relationships with these previously unvisualized works. Welless resistance to linear narrative makes him
increasingly pertinent to postmodern readers, and his enduring inuence on
performance narrative is indebted every bit as much to his incomplete projects
as to his completed texts. The approach this book takes, therefore, emphasizes
the study of Welless creative process, as well as his commercial products in
an eort to deepen and enrich our understanding of his artistry.
To create a critical wedge between authorial intention and a body of works
associated with Welles-as-director, I have found it helpful to think of Welless
unnished projects as representative of a Wellesian brand of entertainment
that Welles, RKO, and the Mercury Theatre built together in the late 1930s
and early 1940s. The evolution of his unique narrative style, ironically,
became a stumbling block for the commercial objectives of the studio, for
the Mercury Theatre, and for Welles himself. The symbiotic relationship of
these three entities created entertainment products that looked commercially promising but were limited by the constraints of technology and mass
marketing of their era. Welless RKO projects represent a discrete body of
work associated with an individual, but they were also collaborative projects
focused on commercial goalsafter all, it was not Welless ambition at this
point in his career to be a Hollywood outsider. He went to Hollywood with
every intention of expanding his own commercial success, as well as that
of RKO and the Mercury Theatre. His particular form of art, however, was
dictated by commercial demands as much as by aesthetic demands, and the
studies of his lm projects in this book seek to analyze how these competing
demands intersected to create uniquely Wellesian products.
Another central goal of this work is to open the Wellesian brand to a
larger audienceto reposition auteurism in order to analyze the radical
potential within its ssures and to emphasize its creation as a commercial
construct. In examining Welles, I nd the term star director more useful
than auteur to emphasize the directors commercial connection to a work
while avoiding the tendency to assign the director sole artistic authority.
Performance texts are by nature deeply collaborative and exible, and the

INTRODUCTION

star director, like a star actor, is a vehicle to market the work more than he
or she is a representation of sole authorship. The directorial brand name is
a powerful marketing tool, and as Gabbard admits, even most American
lm scholars are still likely to say, Have you seen the new Cronenberg lm?
rather than Have you seen A History of Violence?2 This tendency reects
the establishment of a shorthand brand name more than an art form, and
suggests that the works of star directors are just as subject to radical critique
as more marginalized lms and visual products. By their existence, Welless
unnished lms deconstruct the ideal of organic unity within an artistic
product, thus making an argument for a countertradition within the work
of one of the most canonical of the auteurs. This approach suggests that alternate readings of auteurs are possible, combining elements of postmodern
cultural critique with an acknowledgment that these works are associated
with a constellation of themes, images, and techniques that are marketed
around specic individuals. The author in cinema is not dead; she is just
better thought of as a commercially available spokesperson than as the sole
origin of creative genius.
Each chapter probes at least one lm project that was not fully realized by
Welles, exposing his narrative strategies, cultural contexts, aesthetic goals,
and ultimate economic failures. The lms failed in that they were not commercially released, making them tangible representations of Welless fractured relationship with RKO. But economic failure, particularly in Welless
case, does not necessarily equal artistic failure. All of Welless unnished
RKO projects have complex narrative genealogies, richly conceived and
deeply indebted to Welless radio career, which cannot be separated from his
lm career aesthetically, nancially, or chronologically. This book highlights
the interwoven nature of these two creative venues, suggesting that Welless
radio projects shaped his concept of narrative entertainment and inuenced
his open-ended, improvisational style of lmmaking.
Radio in 1938 occupied a rhetorical space similar to that of television
today in the American imagination. Radio then, like television now, acted as
a media source that Americans turned to for reliable, real-time information
about the world outside their homes. But yesterdays radio, like todays television, also negotiated with the American public regarding the line between
news and entertainment. Misleading the American public by means of media
manipulation was regarded as dangerous and transgressive in the 1930s and
1940s, as evidenced by the fallout over Welless War of the Worlds broadcast.
But over time it has become a common entertainment strategy that Stephen
Colbert recently, with a wink and a nudge, designated as truthiness. The
last two chapters of this study explicitly analyze Welless early experiments

INTRODUCTION

with the line between fact and ctiona theme often explored in his later
cinema workand suggest that he helped originate stylistic erosions of the
real in mass media broadcast.
Welless unnished projects predict recurrent patterns in his career, particularly in terms of four features: experimentation with narrative that focused
on the exploration of a rst-person narrator; desire to adapt classic texts for
mass media audiences; recurrent use of expressionist images from modernist
primitivism for the purposes of collective politics; and nally exploration of
the line between reality and ction, tangibly linked to the line between commercially marketable wartime propaganda and marginalized cinematic art.
Through these four modes, a Wellesian rhetoric develops that reects pleasure
in language, performance, and power and invites interpretations that focus
on interplay and ambivalence rather than linear explication.
For example, Welless characters often verbally challenge or contradict
the visual images that surround them. 3 Central characters are often gures
of authority on reluctant quests for truth that involve engaging multiple
perspectives: reporters and detectives permeate the Wellesian landscape.
The most famous of these inquiries, driven by the reporter Thompson in
Citizen Kane, remains unresolvedKanes Rosebud eludes understanding
within the lm and remains only partially known to the viewer.4 As critics
like Frank Tomasulo point out, the visual rhetoric of the lm also positions
Thompson as only one of a variety of narrators. Using techniques he learned
from the radio, Welles nested tales within tales and qualied the power of
the designated narrator.5
Welless rst radio series, First Person Singular: Mercury Theatre on the
Air, is key to understanding his emerging performance rhetoric. The series
reects his desire to explore the possibilities of storytelling through a mass
medium and creates an aesthetic bridge between the collaborative performance concepts he had been integrating into the theater and his increasing
interest in exploring the parameters of identity, a theme that would infuse
his later cinema work. In First Person Singular, Welles wanted both to revitalize literary classics for a mass audience and to establish himself as the
rst-person-singular auteur of these cross-media performance studies. Thus
Wellesian entertainment, even prior to his RKO contract, simultaneously
embraces two very dierent storytelling traditions: the cultural griot and
the star director.6
Chapter 1: First Person Singular and Narrative Strategy
Although stars are products of western capitalism and griots derive from
African communal tradition, aspects of both traditions are present in

INTRODUCTION

Wellesian storytelling. The rst chapter traces these two storytelling traditions in the sphere of modern lmmaking and attempts to place Welles
within the swirling eddies of these techniques. Today Hollywood star directors consolidate nancial and aesthetic power in a way that Welless RKO
contract suggested might be possible but that he was unable to sustain over
the course of his career.7 The rst chapter suggests that Welles established
himself as one of the rst star directors by exploring themes and structures
of the rst-person singular in his early work, particularly in his proposed
projects for Heart of Darkness and a Life of Christ, as well as his most famous
project, Citizen Kane.
The rst chapter culminates in the application of his rst-person-singular
philosophy to the ultimate rst person, Christ, and juxtaposes Welless brief
interest in a lm version of the life of Christ with his fully realized vision of
Charles Foster Kane. Research suggests that Welles rejected his initial interest in Christ because of a cultural resistance to updating and Americanizing
Christs story. He planned to present Jesus Christ in an American pastoral
setting as a type of folk passion play and focus on Christ as a community storyteller, the type of cultural artist and magician that Welles himself aspired
to bea type of griot. The Kane/Christ paradigm ties back to Welless vision
of himself as a rst-person storyteller, a combination actor-director-writer
who forges an artistic persona as both star and genius. Although this artistic
persona led him to be categorized as an auteur, he is not really the author
in any conventional sense of these highly collaborative performances.
Each work is wildly unstable, a living example of the ambiguity of any text
performed before a mass audience, particularly those derived in large part
from collaborations with multiple authors in the process of adapting literary
works for performance. As an artist, Welles mimics the very conditions of
modernity: he hides the mechanisms of his own textual production while
proliferating his products among the masses in a highly exible, adaptive,
and powerful way.
Chapter 2: Classics for the MassesDickens and Welles
Welles employed his weekly radio series not only to experiment with rstperson narrative but also to forge a connection between classic literature and
popular entertainment. This interest in classic literary adaptation denes
another aspect of Wellesian rhetoric. Dickens became Welless most-adapted
author during 1938 and seemed a natural choice for his rst RKO lm. The
second chapter culminates in a study of a version of Pickwick Papers that
never happened.
Welles was willing to share his rst-person status with an author of stature, and an integral part of his practice of self-creation included associating

INTRODUCTION

himself with master authors through adaptation of literary classics. The

Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) hoped to capitalize on the success of
Mercury Theatre adaptations like Macbeth and Native Son by translating
theater into radio, promising in a publicity release on June 8, 1938, prior to the
debut of First Person Singular, that Welles would explore elds of literature
heretofore untouched by radio and bring to that medium the same spirit of
adventure which he brought to the theatre last season.8 CBS hoped to mine
the commercial promise of merging weekly broadcasts of classic literature
for mass entertainment and Welless increasingly intertextual and experimental performances. The merger led to several successful adaptations of one
of the prime gures of literary serialization, Charles Dickens, who perhaps
more than any other author inuenced Welles in his rst year on the radio.
The relationship between these two authors-entertainers reects their similar
abilities to generate serial narratives that encourage audiences to identify with
and depend on the storyteller for regular, commercial entertainment.
Welles adapted a Dickens text almost monthly in 1938, staging productions
of A Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist, Pickwick Papers, and A Christmas Carol.
Dickenss form suited Welless needs in that his serial narratives compressed
easily for radio, oering opportunities for station breaks as well as chances
to interweave character development, lively and suspenseful plots, and social
critique. Welless rst Dickens adaptation, A Tale of Two Cities, compresses
time and history into a double narrative told by Dr. Manette and Sidney
Carton. This broadcast employs several techniques that reappear in later
Welles lms, including the aural equivalent of long takes and dissolves. Oliver
Twist attempted several of these strategies as well, but with less success. By
alternating Olivers narration with Brownlows, Welles divides the listeners
attention without oering a motivation for this distraction. He retains long
passages of sociopolitical critique instead of focusing on character or plot
development, and the story ultimately fails to build a relationship between the
listener and Oliver. In contrast, A Christmas Carol succeeded dramatically and
commercially, in part because it avoided the trap that befell Oliver Twistan
overemphasis on the didactic political message rather than the drama itself.
Welless most successful adaptations strike a balance between cultural immediacy and dramatic eect, a balance that made Dickens a perfect source.
Adapting these classics worked beautifully for Welles on the radio, since
it aorded him a fast method of script development, while still allowing
him to put his artistic imprint on each production. His knowledge of classic literature, coupled with narrative and technological experimentation,
enhanced his reputation as a genius who had mastered both classic and
modern dramatic techniques. This talent at adaptation led directly to his
lm contract with RKO, which hired Welles with the hope that he would

INTRODUCTION

produce a picture a year, based on his success at adapting classic literature for
the masses. His stay at RKO did not fulll this goal, and between 1940 and
1942 the RKO lot was strewn with the bodies of Welless ideas. In fact, until
his 1948 Macbeth, Welles did not really bring a classic to lm as a director.
Instead, Welless creative interest shifted to current topics of politics and
identity, always themes of his adaptations. Specically, his interests shifted
toward primitivist expressionism and south-of-the-border politics.
Chapter 3: Expressionist Primitivism and Welles
Welless third rhetorical mode centered on an interest in multiethnic performance and took two distinct and yet related forms. The rst approach
merged romantic racialism of the nineteenth century and the expressionist
primitivism often associated with high modernism into a Wellesian version
of psychological primitivism. The second approach, indebted to his interest in the rst trope, was a more overtly political, documentary impulse. In
some ways these two strains of Wellesian primitivism are simply a matter
of emphasisthe former putting the accent on the artistic modes of the
primitive via masks, drums, and metaphors of light and dark within the mind
of a white protagonist; the latter accenting a concept of political reality that
attempts to record the quotidian details of primitive cultures for political
purposes and that positions itself as journalism rather than art.
To understand Welless simultaneous interest in primitivism and European classic literature, one need look no farther than modernism and its
fascination with African masks and Latin American art. To classify Welles
as a direct inheritor of modernist primitivism would be, however, an oversimplication, since his political interests associated primitivism with collective, socialist politics at least as early as his 1936 Voodoo Macbeth. The
third chapter looks back to Welless stage career to understand his later radio
and lm uses of primitivism. Starting with the 1936 Voodoo Macbeth, this
chapter traces the legacy of modernist primitivism into later radio plays like
Algiers and The Shadow, and nally into the structure of the lm script for
yet another proposed rst lm project for RKO, Heart of Darkness.
Welles strongly identied with the Heart of Darkness script, and drafts
suggest that the lm would have drawn heavily on Welless previous stage
and radio adaptations of primitivism and directly on his radio performance
of this novel. In addition, the cast was largely composed of actors Welles had
worked with before on stage or radio, including Jack Carter from his Voodoo Macbeth stage production. But in contrast to Macbeth, the Heart of
Darkness project blended an attempt at ethnography with its expressionistic
elements. Welles saw the project as educational, as well as entertaining, and

INTRODUCTION

attempted to conduct anthropological research into the representation of

primitive cultures to present an accurate and yet aesthetically pleasing
image of primitive culture.
The saving grace of this lm might have been Welless self-critical eye,
which is alluded to in his vision of Marlows journey as articulated in the plot
treatment for Heart of Darkness. Welles promises his lm will be a story of
Exploiters in Surroundings Not Healthy for a White Man. Aligning himself
with the Company and Marlow, Welles acknowledges implicitly that he is
himself an exploiter and that his pursuit of exotic fantasies is not healthy for
himself or others. Nevertheless, it is impossible to say how much this lm
would have critiqued its own use of the primitive, since it was never nished.
While the script itself is revealing, it is no closer to an actual distributed lm
than the original script American is to Citizen Kane. What is clear is that
at this early point in his career, Welles had a deep interest in the intersection
of racial and national identity, and this interest remained a constant in his
performances from stage to radio to lm. His work reected increasingly
self-referential ideas about racial and American identities, often specically
formulated in terms of desire and denial in a central white male protagonist,
often played by Welles himself.
Chapter 4: Reality and FictionThe Documentary Narrative
A second strain of Wellesian primitivism attempts to distance itself from
the aesthetic in favor of the real and thus links the third and fourth
modes of Wellesian rhetoric: uses of primitivism and explorations of reality
and ction. The conjunction of a primitivist aesthetic with political reality
is nally and tragically manifest in the Brazilian lm Its All True. This is
the only unnished lm project of this study to come after the release of
Citizen Kane. As a result, the fourth chapter explores this unnished lm as
the culmination of Welless RKO experience. Its All True exhibits Welless
interest in mingling political aspirations with creative vision and suggests
that this mix became increasingly problematic in terms of his relationship
with RKO. Studio restraints on Welless artistic vision were missing in his
production of Its All True, since he was shooting on location in a prewar
environment that made travel increasingly dicult. Far away from the studio,
working without any powerful collaborator like the Mercury Theatres John
Houseman, Welles was given a great deal of creative latitude on this project
in its early stages. The result was a total departure from the narrative style
of his earlier feature-lm projects and an overt attempt to explore a desire
for authenticity (also manifest in his increasing appearances on wartime
news radio). His concept for the lm rejected the traditional binaries of

INTRODUCTION

primitivism that had haunted his Heart of Darknesswhite/black, true/false,

good/evil. Instead, it sought a polyglot, multiracial narrative form that could
represent the diversity of Brazilian culture. In short, Its All True rejected
the conventions of classic Hollywood cinema.9
This ambitious attempt at a truth narrative told by a white, North
American visitor to South American culture, however, was positioned within
a cultural and historical matrix of conditions that ensured its failure. Freed
and isolatedby political support and wartime travel restrictions, Welles
operated beyond studio parameters in Brazil, exploring his philosophical
and political aspirations on lm. Although his new attempts at narrative
construction were revolutionary (and disturbing to the studio), Welles was
unable to dislodge himself from a position of privileged observation, and
his narrative attempt at unstructured, polyglot truth was relegated rst to
RKOs lm vault and then largely to the open sea.10
The critical debate over this unnished lm, like the debate surrounding
much of Welless work, tends to focus on defending or rejecting its value in
terms of Welles as artist-auteur. But as Catherine Benamou has usefully
pointed out, Welless suggestion that this picture would act as a type of
magazine feature rejected the very concept of author in its conventional
sense.11 The project challenged cultural values of the time, including RKOs
desire for quick commercial success in the face of war and the mainstream
concept of entertainment narrative. The very mechanisms of production
studio stang practices, camera equipment, marketing strategies, audience
expectationswere set against a project that simultaneously experimented
with the concept of visual narrative, pushed the envelope of contemporary
politics and race relations, and reworked traditional production concepts of
casting, scripting, and editing.
Its All True represented the farthest step in a concept Welles had been
exploring for some timethe documentary ction. To make the classics
compelling to a modern audience, Welles repeatedly infused his adaptations
with cultural politics.12 The potential power of this conjunction between narrative experimentation and contemporary political meaning fully emerged in
his War of the Worlds broadcast, which successfully exploited an American
culture of prewar fear and created truth out of ction for many listeners.
This interest in juxtaposing reality and ction culminated in Its All True,
the last of his RKO lm projects.
Afterword: Wellesian LegaciesStar Directors and Truthiness
The afterword returns to two traditions that the emergent Wellesian brand
helped establish and that have particular resonance in contemporary Ameri

INTRODUCTION

can culture: the Christ narrative and its correlation with the star director,
and explorations of media truthiness. The Christ narrative represents the
ultimate rst-person-singular narrative in its cultural power and controversy,
whereas the concept of truthiness directly reects the aftermath of Wellesian
experimentation with fake documentary expression and the elusive nature
of cinematic authenticity. This nal section fast-forwards to the legacies of
Welless narrative experiments and suggests why his early projects are of such
importance to understanding contemporary media entertainment.
The Christ project has become a type of test for budding star directors
to establish themselves or, in the case of Mel Gibson, for the crossover star
actor to establish credibility and prestige as a director. The Christ narrative
takes on a cultural topic of historic and spiritual importance and seeks to
assert masculinist control over an bernarrative. It can be seen as the ultimate challenge in terms of textual adaptation and is accordingly fraught
with peril in terms of potential public censure. The assumption is that if the
(male) director can assert creative control over this master narrative, then
he has achieved technical, commercial, and cultural prociency. Specically
examining the spectacle of male suering and Gibsons The Passion of the
Christ, the rst section of this chapter traces the contemporary relevance of
an idea Welles played with a generation earlier and suggests both its continuing power and its limitations.
While Gibson is interesting in terms of oering a case study of an actor
attempting to build a directorial brand, Steven Spielberg oers us a glimpse
of the commercial aftermath of the Wellesian brand at its most extreme.
Through Amblin Entertainment and DreamWorks, Spielberg has created a
commercial umbrella that extends over not only his own projects but also
those of other lmmakers whom he sponsors. In addition, Spielberg produced
his own version of Welless most famous adaptation, War of the Worlds. One
might at rst expect that Spielbergs 2005 adaptation of War of the Worlds
would more directly link to Welless entertainment legacy than Gibsons
Christ project, but there is little Wellesian inuence in the Spielberg adaptation. Although Spielberg attempts to adapt a classic text into a post-9/11
context, his adaptation fails to achieve the immediacy of Welless 1938 radio
broadcast. Looking at Gibson and Spielberg, we see a tenuous connection
to Welless directorial products, even though they mimic some of his early
professional projects. Overall, there is less Wellesian residue in the gure
of the star director than in the other strand of Wellesian entertainment
legacythe exploration of truthiness.
The second part of the afterword analyzes a Wellesian tradition that resonates broadly within contemporary culture: the erosion of truth in mass media

INTRODUCTION

entertainment. The success of The Daily Show and its spin-o The Colbert
Report is frequently traced back to Saturday Night Lives Weekend Update, but
actually the fake news format owes its success to much earlier experiments
by Orson Welles. I suggest that Welles provoked awareness of the potential
of truthiness in his 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast, and that the logical
conclusion of his career-long exploration of the line between fact and ction
has been the reduction of the panic provoked by his initial 1938 broadcast to
the laughter provoked by contemporary fake news shows. The devolution of
American trust in the news format reects the transition from modern to
postmodern subjectivity, not just an emerging distrust of truth in the media
but a pleasure taken from the interplay between truth and ction. The quest
for Truth, for Rosebud, is replaced instead by pleasure in the excavation of its
multiple meanings (and panic over elusive truth is replaced by laughter at the
slippery nature of such a concept). Similarly, Welless unnished works reect
a pleasure in their lack of closure. They deed RKOs lmmaking structure,
instead remaining in multiple potential imaginary forms. Increasingly, this
sense of interplay would capture Welless style, and later projects like Mr.
Arkadin and F for Fake fully embrace narrative ambiguity.
Conclusion
The four Wellesian narrative modes of rst-person singular, classic adaptation, expressionist primitivism, and truthiness developed early in Welless
career and result directly from his simultaneous work on radio and lm.
Each style served specic cultural and commercial purposes. First-person
narrative allowed Welles to be closely associated with his work, which in
turn allowed him to appear as the conduit for the stories themselves and to
build the myth of individual authorship and its accompanying star status.
Contemporary political associations lent his projects a cultural immediacy
that studio executives hoped would bring money into the theater, and his
innovative infusion of politics into classic texts helped give his views cultural
legitimacy. Welless interest in the primitive often led him to represent his
political consciousness through a connection to dark, exotic bodies, both
shocking and mesmerizing studio executives. These narrative styles converged in his nal unmade project, Its All True, which challenged patterns of
classic narrative cinema and marked a decided shift in his career toward the
margins and away from the center of cultural and commercial production.
His exploration of rst-person narration, classic adaptation, expressionist
primitivism, and pseudodocumentary forms had been glimpsed in his earlier theater and radio careers, but they fully emerged during his early and
abbreviated relationship with RKO.

INTRODUCTION

Ironically, we see the Wellesian performance genealogy most clearly

in his unreleased RKO lms: The Life of Christ, Pickwick Papers, Heart of
Darkness and Its All True. Each owed great debts to his radio interests in
narrative experimentation, adaptation and primitivism,13 and each of these
works reveals much about Welless working process, remaining highly suggestive in their multiple meanings and cultural implications while refusing
denition by industrial commerce. Their lack of nal distribution suggests
both that traditional Hollywood was not ready for Welles and that Welles
was ill-tted to the commercial, logistical, and cultural constraints of Hollywood. RKO wanted Welles to reproduce his radio success on lm, but the
more Welles tried to create a cinematic version of the balance of commerce,
art, and entertainment present in his radio programs, the more he failed. The
lms that were able to survive the RKO system of generation strongly emphasize a single aspect of his four rhetorical modes: Citizen Kane embodied
rst-person, retrospective inquiry; The Magnicent Ambersons oered the
adaptation of a comparatively straightforward author in Booth Tarkington;
Journey into Fear emphasized Welles as star but not narrator-director.
Delving into his incomplete texts illuminates the problems and the rewards
of textual production that transcend commerce. The very notion of an incomplete text is oxymoronic in a performance medium; although such texts
have not gone through the commercial editing and marketing process, they
are often highly developed conceptually. They reect personal expression,
collaborative give-and-take, and a unifying vision.
Welles was equal parts communal storyteller and capitalist star; his work
has clear relevance to several media entertainment traditions that dominate
the digital universe today. These early and unnished works evoke his late
and unnished Don Quixote, and we are left with images of him tilting at
windmills in one of the most tantalizingly unnished projects of his career,
skirting along the periphery of Spain, exploring the territories of Cervantes
with his own rhetorical ourish, establishing himself rmly within the canon
of cinema studies, and conjuring sweaty hoards of admirers, even among the
cool and distant circles of academe.

2WP_cTa
Origins of the First-Person Singular:
Mercurial Theatre on the Air
In 1938, Orson Welles moved Mercury Theatre from stage to radio, beginning his dramatic series First Person Singular: Mercury Theatre on the Air.
By the end of this year, Welles would be beckoned to Hollywood to begin his
lm career with RKO. During this time Welles established a creative process
that interwove narrative strategies from stage, radio, and screen. He created
a unique artistic persona and a trademark brand of narrative that invited
publicity and allowed him to move to Hollywood not just as an actor but
as an actor-director-writer with a record-breaking contract in terms of the
money and power that it promised.
Welles often adapted social-realist narratives through a psychoanalytic
lens, using interpretations conveyed by a rst-person narrator. His narrative
strategies developed unconventional notions of text, author, and audience, which became easily recognizable to his audiencea Wellesian brand
attractive to customers. This chapter examines the commercial failure
of the Wellesian brand and argues that it was only a temporary promotional failure, for the Wellesian brand wields perhaps more inuence now
than ever, and the very proliferation of Wellesian texts begs postmodern
examination. Thus the image of Welles as famed modernist auteur gives
way to that of a Wellesian commercial and cultural branda multifaceted
success that ourishes even at the expense of the traditional concept of
individual authorship.
The Wellesian Brand: A Classic for the Masses
It is helpful to think of Welless work as a brand rather than a texta
constellation of materials that results in various texts, whether these are
performed, photographed, or merely generated through surrounding letters,

ORIGINS OF THE FIRSTPERSON SINGULAR

photographs, and newspaper clippings. The term brand also captures the
commercial pressures and goals surrounding the Wellesian productions for
RKO, as well as the results of his artistic and commercial partnerships with
entities as diverse as the Mercury Theatre, Campbell Soup, and the U.S.
government. Welless RKO era coincides with the consolidation of brand
marketing strategies in larger American culture. As Simon Anholt and
Jeremy Hildreth note in their history of American branding, The walls between marketing, entertainment, politics and the military, always somewhat
permeable in the American culture, had truly been dismantled by the mid
1940s,1 in part because of World War II.2 In Welless case, pro-Ally, anti-Axis
propaganda funds directly supported his nal RKO project, Its All True, as
well as his Pan-American broadcasts of the era.
First-Person Narrative and the Wellesian Voice
Brands have personalities that, like people, consist of a whole range of
moods and attitudes.3 Any brand establishes its personality by matching
its strengths to the needs of the marketplace, making an emotional connection with the consumer, and being broad enough in scope to encompass
a variety of products. One of the most eective strategies for connecting
with the consumer is sensory branding, or the use of stimuli to help the
consumer associate positive experiences and images with the brand. As
Martin Lindstrom describes, The purpose of a sensory branding strategy
is emotional engagement.4 The rise of the Wellesian brand was enormously
aided by his distinctive voice and thus by Welless work on the radio, which
oered built-in sensory marketing.
Welless resonant voice became his primary semiotic identier, or logo.
The sound of his voice became a distinctive sign of the Wellesian brand, much
like the label of his radio sponsor, Campbells Soup. Welles was tremendously
successful at using his voice as an icon of his brand, which oered quick
concentrations of meaning and sensory imprints that instantly summon
the brand essence.5 Welless voice summoned associations with entertainment, narrative experimentation, and classical quality. It was so integral to
his work that when in October 1942 he asked for format ideas regarding a
new show sponsored by Lockheed Vega, 6 Arthur Miller responded,
Your voice is a format. The only two things that must be heard at the
beginning of the show every week are your voice and Lockheed-Vega.
Those are the two things that must be the same every week[. . . .] Your
voice, if I may say so, portends much. It and Lockheed-Vega identify
the show, along with the title. Thats all a format can do, portend and
identify.7

ORIGINS OF THE FIRSTPERSON SINGULAR

Apropos of Welless lm work, Dudley Andrew suggests that Welless voice

allowed him to break decisively with Hollywood sound practice and to give
his lms a new tone bearing an unaccustomed feeling.8 His voice came to
represent narrative innovation and the promise of a certain level of intellectual quality.
Welless voice was a clear and emphatic icon of a particular point of view,
a dominant persona, which in its narrative form will be referred to here as
the rst-person singular. Wellesian productions are characterized by an
ambiguity or oscillation at the heart of the narrative, often manifest in attitudes toward a grand, complex, central gurethe rst person singular
of the performance. Michael Denning sees these as gigantic gures which
combine a political demonology with overtones of Shakespearean tragedy.9
The concept of a narrative driven by the rst-person perspective, often delivered by direct address and representing an immense personage at the center
of the lm, drives his three earliest lm projects: the unnished Heart of
Darkness, Citizen Kane, and his proposal for a life of Christ, to star himself.
Each of these three central characters (Kurtz, Kane, Christ) would have offered viewers a complex point of identication in that they are enormously
compelling and yet tragic gures. In addition, the Wellesian larger-than-life
character is both human and deeply awed, a requirement that raised serious
diculties in the Life of Christ project.10
These gigantic central gures dominate the screen both visually and
aurally, and their rhetorical power embodies strategies of storytelling that
Welles had developed on the radio. Welless storytelling process constructed
imaginative worlds for listeners and viewers alike, fully engaging both aural
and visual elds of representation. Welles consciously used tricks from each
performance medium to whet the appetite for another, translating his skills
in the theater into marketable qualities for radio, and translating his radio
successes into collateral for lm success. In return, many ideas he used on
radio moved back into theater, and actors he couldnt aord to pay for work
on stalled lm projects appeared on his radio shows instead.
On radio, personal connection to the aural narrative is key, since as Robert
Spadoni observes, radio connects to the audience not through the picture
plane but through a shared space of imagination.11 Welless voice became
a familiar guide within this shared imaginative space. Not coincidentally,
his rst-person approach foregrounded Welles as the storyteller, positioning him as the lter for the audiences experience and promoting him as the
central gure of deeply collaborative productions.
Welles decided to give most of the stories in his 1938 radio series the immediacy of a rst-person narrator. Dracula, A Tale of Two Cities, and Oliver

ORIGINS OF THE FIRSTPERSON SINGULAR

Twist, for example, are powerfully told in this manner. Use of the rst-person
narrator gave him the ability to collapse past memory into present commentary and oered the radio listener a sense of intimacy. Welles described
the eectiveness of this form of narration: when a person comes on the air
and says, This happened to me!, youve got to listen.12 Welless personal
connection with the audience facilitated the misinterpretation of his famous
War of the Worlds broadcast, because the authoritative tones of Professor
Pierson (played by Welles) eroded into panic, taking the audience with him.
The performance played with aural expectations in several ways, misleading the audience in part, Titus Ensink suggests, because it manipulated
familiar audio codes of the era. Ensink points to radios status as a major
and trustworthy source of information, the frequent use of on-the-spot
reporting during major events, and the ability of listeners to join the play in
progress, as features that undermined the opening statement that the work
was ctional.13 In sum, Welles exploited expectations as to the conventions
of the [radio play] genre.14
The aural techniques that Welles borrowed from radio and used in his
RKO cinema productions often had a postmodern deconstructive eect.
For example, his faux documentary Its All True blurred the line between
propaganda and ction. Similarly, aural techniques such as the interrelating
of voice-over commentary, diegetic chorus, and dramatic dialog created
dissonance within the visual world of cinema.15 Innovations like overlapping
dialogue and a spatial soundtrack gave listeners a sense of depth of eld and
the feeling of listening to a storytelling voice rather than reading a text.16
But these techniques also disoriented viewers. The Wellesian voice thus
comprises much more than Welless actual voice. It is a collage of images,
sounds, and stylistic innovations that form a Wellesian rhetoric evocative
of Welles as author, narrator, and performer.
Welles was able to translate his unusual storytelling voice into cinema,
oering the sense of a Wellesian narrator who guides the textual experience. In his proposed opening for Heart of Darkness, for example, he establishes himself as the dominant owner-creator of audience experience, caging
them as canaries, shooting them and electrocuting them. This dominating
Wellesian voice is often associated with either excess or fascism. It is also
explicitly rst-person singular, a symptom of the larger-than-life character
that Slavoj iek associates with both the fascist and Quixotic in Wellesian
cinema.17 Frank Tomasulo argues that gurations of sound, angle, focus, and
blocking create a very specic authorial presence: the motion picture director
in Welless work.18 Yet Welles had already developed this sense of an authorial
voice, an intermediary between audience and actor, on radio. As a result,

ORIGINS OF THE FIRSTPERSON SINGULAR

Welles was a star director even before he made his rst lm, and his presence
conveys the sense of a rst-person singular narrator behind the camera even
when a character performing rst-person narration is absent.
Modernist Rhetoric: Erosions of Truth and Fiction
The emerging Wellesian performance rhetoric is marked by four features:
experimentation with a rst-person narrator, adaptation of classic texts
for mass media, recurrent use of images from modernist primitivism, and
nally exploration of the line between reality and ction. Each of these four
rhetorical modes has its origin in the movement of modernism, and the
tension inherent in Welless eorts to fuse literary adaptation and narrative
experimentation often positions him as a modernist.19 In particular, there
is a very close relationship between Welless use of the rst-person narrator
and his exploration of subjective truths. Citizen Kane, his most respected
and studied work, has been critically described as a modernist exploration
of subjectivity. It is also frequently interpreted as a novelistic work of social
realism. Andr Bazin, for example, sees both Citizen Kane and The Magnicent Ambersons as the cinematic equivalents of realistic novels.20 Welles
himself described his radio plays, which he developed concurrently with
Citizen Kane, as more akin to the form of the novel, to story telling, than to
anything else.21 And when Welles paradoxically asserted, I do not want to
resemble the majority of Americans who are demagogues and rhetoricians.
This is one of Americas great weaknesses, and rhetoric is one of the greatest
weaknesses of American artists,22 he positioned himself as a spokesman for
modernist dependence on and yet suspicion of rhetoric, a practitioner of an
anti-rhetorical rhetoric that almost dened the modernist ethos.23
Ambiguity and irresolution lie at the heart of the modernist text, and the
Wellesian narrative embraces modernist discomfort with closure.24 Welles even
extends his playfulness with authenticity and truth into the realm of self-performance. Despite the fact that Welles treated public address in Citizen Kane
as a hollow deception, he was also a public orator who used such speech to
manipulate audiences (consumers) to buy his own specic brand of entertainment.25 Ambivalence, then, lies not just at the heart of his nished performance
texts but also at the heart of his performance process. The instability of performance-as-text, coupled with Wellesian senses of irony, self-referentiality,
and dissolution of structure, combine to make even his nished texts deeply
unstable in their meanings, much less his unnished texts, which continue
to resonate with possibilities and questions rather than achieving closure. In
this way, the unnished texts are more Wellesian than are the commercially
released RKO projects. The unmarketed works oer an imaginative richness

ORIGINS OF THE FIRSTPERSON SINGULAR

that is more powerful specically because they remain within the eld of
the audiences imagination. Traditionally, the lack of commercial nality of
Wellesian texts has been regarded as a problem, a symptom of his status as an
outcast modernist, rather than a sign of an emerging postmodern aesthetic.
But this lack of resolution is a hallmark of his performance brand, and the
pleasures of irresolution and ambiguity are quintessentially Wellesian.
Welless exploration of the disjuncture between public and private selfrepresentations, for example, resonates in Citizen Kane. Disparate images of
the truth of Kane emerge from the juxtaposition of public speechwords
published by Kanes empire and other news sourcesagainst images of
Kanes private life. The lm chronicles a failed quest to establish the personal
meaning of even a single word, Rosebud.26 Citizen Kane reects a theme
and style consistent within Welless oeuvre. Throughout his career Welles
was interested in interrogations of truth and ction so probing as to erode
the meaning of narrative subjectivity.27 This theme is most overtly present in
the unnished Its All True, but it is also central to later lms such as Mr.
Arkadin and F for Fake. Stylistically, Welles embodied this erosion of truth
telling by using new broadcast tactics within ctitious performances. 28
Treading the line between truth and fictionin fact, exploiting the
audiences interest in this linebecame a primary signier of the Wellesian
brand. 29 Ultimately, this part of the Wellesian aesthetic was detrimental
to the mass-market appeal of his products, proving a hard sell to average
consumers. Nevertheless, in the rst stage of his career both Welles and Hollywood saw potential for the sale of his brand to the masses rather than to a
niche market by positioning Welles as an innovative young artist struggling
against crusty conventions of style and narration.30 Welles was at times
deeply concerned with the mass marketing of his works, and the stated goal
of the Mercury Theatre, after all, was to bring the classics to the masses. To
make Welless experimentalism more palatable, the First Person Singular
series attached his voice and innovative narrative methods to familiar classic works. 31 This early version of the Wellesian brand was based on mass
marketing, not niche marketing.
To meet his goal of revitalizing literary classics for a radio audience, Welles
had to gure out how to retell canonical narratives in a one-hour, soundonly format. Adapting such classics as Dracula, A Tale of Two Cities, and
Heart of Darkness for radio broadcast served twin needs for Welles, since
they reinforced his association with elite literature and yet contained enough
melodrama and violence that he could pitch them as mass entertainment. He
funneled the novels through his own narrative persona, and thus emerged
Welles the American griota storyteller able to take established narratives

ORIGINS OF THE FIRSTPERSON SINGULAR

and convey them within a new cultural and technological context, to act not
just as a truth teller but also as a witness to archetypal sequences of events.
Via this system, Welles emerged as the rst-person-singular author of highly
collaborative works.
Problem Texts: Postmodernity and the Irresolution of Performance
Stylistically a modernist lmmaker, Welles nevertheless became adept at representing the state of modern consciousness as it evolved toward postmodern
disorientation, and his characters often represent an inability to construct
any single truth when it comes to personal or public history. His embrace of
disorientating nonlinear texts actually enhances the contemporary relevance
of his unnished works in particular, since these works tend to erode the line
between the designations of modernism and postmodernism, positioning
Welles as easily within the latter category as the former.
Completion of any Wellesian cinematic text is, rst and foremost, imaginary. Welles shot footage that wasnt used, was notoriously undermined or
disengaged during the editing process of his released works, and struggled
with a sense of authorial ownership of his nished lms ranging from the
scriptwriting controversy of Citizen Kane to the multiple versions of his
1950s project Mr. Arkadin/Condential Report. The problem Welles poses
for scholars of his work is primarily a postmodern one: how does one attempt
to discuss his work as a stable piece of art when its very form is unstable?
And how does one attribute his work to a solo artist named Welles when
his working style was always highly collaborative, spontaneous, and subject
to revision over the course of decades? As Jonathan Rosenbaum points out,
Welless intentions were rarely stable or clear.32
The unfullled promise of an imaginary completion, however, makes his
incomplete projects all the more resonant. If one can put aside the quest for
authorial intentionality and let the incomplete texts reside in the same
eld of inquiry as the complete texts, then a fertile set of images emerges,
revealing the plurality of the Wellesian text, the creation of shifting and
suggestive narrative voices that alternately embrace and reject the demands
of commercial nality without capitulating to them. Even if we were to
search for authorial intentionality, it seems as if Welless partial intent was
incompletion, since in a 1939 speech he rejected the assembly-line method
of manufacturing entertainment that he attributed to Hollywood and positioned himself as an artist interested in the craft of moviemaking rather
than the business of selling it.33
The correspondence surrounding Welless RKO productions suggests not
only that he was ambivalent about the relationship between craft and com

ORIGINS OF THE FIRSTPERSON SINGULAR

merce but also that his ambivalence was imbedded within the mechanics
of performance. This insured that the production process would preserve
ambivalence rather than resolve it and that a final commercially viable
product might be wanting. RKO, the Mercury Theatre publicity machine,
Welless own lawyer, and the actors and writers with whom he worked were
all implicated in his construction of texts and their commercial distribution (or lack thereof). Precisely by remaining unnished, these Wellesian
texts became an enduring brand that supersedes association with a single
author, a sort of urtext that mimics the central problem posed by his nished lms: how to transcend the rst-person singular as a personal event
and tie it instead to its multiple cultural and social contexts. The process
of constructing and deconstructing the concept of I is a central theme in
both his nished and unnished works, but the unnished works pose this
problem in structure as well as in theme.
Psychology, Doubleness, and the First-Person Narrator
We are born into stories. Everything we remember is remembered
through narratives, verbal constructions, images which individual history imbues with the luster of myth[. . . .] Telling, writing, interpreting
these stories is the stu of psychoanalysis as well as literature[.]34
Welless narrative style has often been tied to just the sort of personal yet
mythic storytelling described above by Linda Williams, particularly obvious
in his First Person Singular radio series and in the gure of Charles Foster
Kane. Citizen Kane is often regarded as posing the problem of coherent
identity both for Kane and for Welles, 35 but the larger-than-life Wellesian
I existed in two other RKO projects, both unrealized: the proposed Heart
of Darkness and The Life of Christ.
Welless larger-than-life characters pose problems of personal, cultural,
and national identity for the viewer. These questions, while innovative for
mid-twentieth-century media performance, were not new to narrative
in general. Part of the storytellers traditional function has been to pose
fundamental problems of subjectivity, authenticity, and knowledgeepistemological problems heightened in modernity. 36 Welles developed a brand
of narration that posed these complex questions but marketed them to mass
consumers. What was War of the Worlds if not a demonstration of the difculty of perceiving reality in a mass media world? Welless narrative brand
established a preoccupation with duality, ambiguity, and the threat of a lack
of meaning at the heart of even his nished texts. His unnished texts pose
these diculties more uently than the nished ones in that they show little

ORIGINS OF THE FIRSTPERSON SINGULAR

eort to reconcile thematic and structural contradictions, embracing a lack

of resolution and eschewing the sense of a coherent narrative I.
Since Welles himself is integrated into his rst-person performance texts
as both author and performer, the deconstruction of his modern subjects
often operates on two registers, one of which questions the trustworthiness
of the author and another of which erodes the coherence of the character
or narrator. Dudley Andrew regards this duality as a Wellesian hallmark:
the doubleness and distance that so dene the world of Orson Welles. 37
Similarly, Tomasulo interprets Citizen Kane as evoking the duality between
not only Kane himself as man/boy and narrator/character but also Orson
Welles as actor/author.38 Thus sense of a quest for rst-person meaning
expands narrative beyond the diegetic space of lm and transforms questions about the meaning of Kanes Rosebud into questions about meaning
in modern existence. Performance becomes a metonym for the location of
the self within modernity.39 The Wellesian narrative deconstructs selfhood
both within and outside the text.
The problem of locating a discrete Wellesian text emerges partly from
the conditions of performance. Performances mix art and commerce and
exist only ephemerally in the audiences imagination.40 These conditions
are especially pronounced in radio performance, which projects itself into
as many situational contexts as there are listeners. Each home has its own
performance environment that aects the listeners way of listening; it is
impossible to locate a single text of these radio plays. The scripts themselves
represent only intentions, not the actual experiences of the performances.
Primal Branding and Welles
Notably, the Wellesian narrative brand emerged rst on radio, most powerfully through the infamous War of the Worlds broadcast and the subsequent
coupling of Welles with the iconic brand Campbell Soup. By partnering with
Campbell Soup, Welles established a brand alliance, or a co-brand, such as
often forms between businesses with similar philosophies.41 Campbell Soup
was well on its way to becoming an iconic brand even in the late 1930s.42 At rst
glance the Wellesian brand shared few values with the soup people, as John
Houseman referred to them.43 There were, however, certain cross-associations:
quality, wholesomeness, and a sense that classic literature, like soup, is good
food. But there were also inherent conicts, since the Wellesian brand was
associated with experimentation, deconstruction of subjectivity, and socially
progressive politicsall decidedly not goals of Campbell Soup.
CBS originally hoped to capitalize on the stage success of the Mercury
Theatre by translating their classics-for-the-masses format into radio. A

ORIGINS OF THE FIRSTPERSON SINGULAR

publicity release on June 8, 1938, promoting First Person Singular, promised

that Welles would explore elds of literature heretofore untouched by radio
and bring to that medium the same spirit of adventure which he brought to
the theatre last season.44 But as CBS would soon discover, there are both
strengths and weaknesses in a marketing brand based on the cult of personality. The Mercury Theatre brand depended on the mercurial temper of its
brand personality, Orson Welles.
Brand personalities comprise a distinct subset of marketing brands overall.
They are powerful in their emotional hold over consumers but are also notoriously volatile and often short-lived in market draw. The Wellesian brand
ts the paradigm of a brand personality in many ways, except that Welles exceeded the role of a mere spokesperson. Any brand personality automatically
covers two of seven categories in what Patrick Hanlon describes as primal
brandingthe development of icons and leadersin a paradigm that invokes
a decidedly Freudian structure to capture the psychological power of certain
brand personalities. All seven of Hanlons brand components exist within
the Wellesian brand: icons, leaders, creation stories, creeds, rituals, pagans,
and sacred words.45
Welless voice provided the icon, and he additionally fullled the role of
brand leader, the person who is the catalyst, the risk taker, the visionary,
the iconoclast who set out against all odds (and often against the world at
large) to re-create the world according to their own sense of self, community,
and opportunity.46 In this way, Welles functions as his own larger-than-life
character, much like Kane.
Welles was the type of brand personality who became a commodity
himself rather than just allying himself with a particular product. Like most
iconic gures, he was surrounded by personal anecdotes of his success and
his exceptionality, creation stories in Hanlons terms. Simon Anholt and
Jeremy Hildreth indicate that the purpose of these anecdotes is to make key
attributes of the personal brand striking and memorable.47 Welless publicity
team often tailored the stories of his origins to specic project needs. When
Welles was planning his Rio project, they highlighted his connection to Brazil, even going so far as to suggest that he was either conceived in Brazil or almost born there, and thus considered himself Cariocan.48 In the fall of 1939
Welless publicist Herb Drake wrote to inquire of Maurice Bernstein about
the prehistoric days of the Christ Child (meaning Welless childhood), and
Bernstein replied that Welles arrived in Kenosha on the 6th of May 1915.
On the 7th of May, 1915, he spoke his rst words [. . .] he said I am a genius
[. . .] on May 15th he seduced his rst woman.49 The essence of the Welles
creation tale is that he is a cosmopolitan genius. The specics of the tale vary

ORIGINS OF THE FIRSTPERSON SINGULAR

according to the audience (or potential consumer). Since the creation story
is the cornerstone for the other pieces of the primal branding structure, the
telling of it is a sensitive operation: like telling a good tale, the opportunity
is how to make it interesting. Then you must decide where to communicate
it. Do you include it in public relation eorts, on the Internet, in advertising,
on packaging?50 Welles, always a fabulous storyteller with a penchant for
the press, made an ideal icon for the Wellesian brand, since he could reiterate the creation story for various audiences in diverse media, while always
remaining recognizable by his resonant voice and sardonic wit.
The creed is an equally important part of Hanlons primal branding
code because it claries the brands mission. The early Wellesian brand depended heavily on the Mercury Theatre, a sign of credibility and continuity
that bridged Welless transitions from stage to radio to screen. Through his
work with the Mercury Theatre, he was able to articulate a series of concrete
aims regarding performance style, target audience, and political allegiance.
Houseman and Welles stipulated the goals for their Mercury Theatre productions in speeches, newspaper articles, and press releases. A June 8, 1938,
CBS press release quoted Welles:
I think it is time [. . .] that radio came to realize the fact that no matter
how wonderful a play may be for the stage it cannot be as wonderful
for the air. The Mercury Theater has no intention of producing its stage
repertoire in these broadcasts. Instead we plan to bring to radio the
experimental techniques which have proved so successful in another
medium and to treat radio itself with the intelligence and respect such
a beautiful and powerful medium deserves. 51
Welles wanted to create intimacy through a mass medium, to convey individual experience in a collective broadcast. In a Newsweek article published
July 11, 1938, he promised to use the resources of radio to move beyond the
cut-and-dried dramatic technique of theater. To do so, he would focus on
his own power as narrator in the radio series, cultivating his ability to draw
his listeners into the charmed circle of his storytelling. 52 Recognizing the
intimate nature of radio as a performance medium that entered individual
homes, he believed, as James Naremore surmises, that the invisible audience
should never be considered collectively, but individually.53 The Wellesian
brand of storytelling oered personal, emotional, and individual connections
by positioning Welles himself at the center of his narratives as a touchstone for
the listener, a facilitator of personal experience amid a mass event. Ordinarily,
this type of connection is a positive thing, helping to build the emotional
bond of the brand. In cases like the War of the Worlds broadcast, however, it

ORIGINS OF THE FIRSTPERSON SINGULAR

proved more problematic, spurring individual feelings of anxiety as Welless

character, Professor Pierson, dissolved into panic. Nevertheless, Campbell
Soup saw marketing potential in any performer who could elicit such a strong
emotional response from an audience, and soon after the War of the Worlds
broadcast, Mercury Theatre on the Air became Campbell Playhouse.
The original title capitalized on the association with quality experimentation by invoking Welless prior work with the Mercury Theatre. Welles
transferred not only the Mercury production name to his radio program but
also his creative partners and actors. The main goal of the Mercury Theatre,
articulated by John Houseman in his letter to Burns Mantle of the Daily News
on October 13, 1937, was to form a theater at which the public may see exciting
productions of great plays at prices easily within their reach.54 Houseman
and Welles intended to bring back into the theatre some of the violence and
immediacy of the Elizabethan theater while also looking for new playwrights
and material.55 As indicated by press releases from CBS during 1938, the goal
was to adapt the Mercury Theatre performance model of narrative experimentation with classic texts into the medium of radio, bringing the public
memory of the Mercurys manifesto to the new productions.
By 1938 the Wellesian brand had also established rituals of performance,
or what Hanlon terms sacred words. The serial format allowed for the predictable weekly availability of the Wellesian brand, increasing the chances for
positive interactions with consumers that create brand vitality.56 Within the
world of his performances, Welles employed audio cues and catch phrases
to initiate listeners and viewers. His later radio broadcasts in particular
made clear eorts to open with tag lines such as Hello, Americans, which
he used in his Pan-American broadcasts and which became the series title.
Even the 1938 broadcasts included consistent audio cues: for instance, Ernest
Chappells voice distinguished the Campbell Soup commercials from the
passages of drama, and an excerpt from Tchaikovskys Piano Concerto no.
1 in B-at minor opened the show.
Sacred Wellesian words emerge as well in the reactions to his work, words
repeated not by Welles but by his admirers. As Hanlon says, all belief systems
come with a set of specialized words that must be learned before people can
belong, and in primal branding the goal is to create an emotional need for
people to belong by purchasing the brand. Thus sacred words in branding
become not simply professional jargon but crucial to understanding a technical process.57 In the case of Welles, the sacred words of cinema can convert
audience members into fansemotionally bonded consumers. Terms like
deep focus or Rosebud initiate the Wellesian consumer into the club of
critics and the niche market of the cinephile or auteur, demonstrating both

ORIGINS OF THE FIRSTPERSON SINGULAR

knowledge of and relationship to the product and reiterating the traditional

associations of Welless work with prestige and innovation.58 Consumers who
speak these sacred words often purchase Wellesian products (DVDs, books,
CDs), propagating the Wellesian brand. Since it meets all the requirements
for primal branding then, why did the Wellesian entertainment brand fail
to ourish under the RKO studio system?
Failure of the Wellesian Brand?
If one thinks of Welless shift from radio into lm as a brand extension,
then it failed in the short term because it didnt link strongly enough to
the Mercury Theatre creed of populism but became instead a singular
vehicle for Welless personal stardom. Paradoxically, his brand name grew
as his bankroll languished. He experienced what is known as blowback:
when the disconnect between the brand message and corporate behaviour
becomes too great, the marketing too hypocritical, the end justifying the
means a little too often, then public protest tends to be intense in proportion to the strength of the brand.59 Thus his popularity and status following
War of the Worlds and Citizen Kane invited proportionate levels of scrutiny
and criticism of his subsequent projects. He ran afoul of RKO with Heart
of Darkness, The Magnicent Ambersons, and Its All True, and simultaneously consumers were deprived of his regular radio broadcasts and theater
performances, both of which became less routinely available as he devoted
more time to cinema.
Nevertheless, the Wellesian brand can be seen at worst as a temporary
failure. It failed only in the sense that it did not ourish within the closed
circuit of the Hollywood studio system. As Paul Arthur points out, Fifteen
years after his death, we are suddenly awash in Wellesiana, inundated by
Orson.60 The Wellesian brand today is a viable commercial product, albeit
within a niche market. Welles failed, however, to live up to the commercial
expectations of RKO when he produced fewer complete than incomplete
projects. One way to regard the waning appeal of the Wellesian brand in the
mid-1940s is in terms of a fracture in Welless temperamental anity with
American politics in postWorld War II culture, all too neatly symbolized
by his role shift from propagandist to expatriate.61 His last RKO project was
funded as part of the U. S. Governments Good Neighbor policy, but his
post-RKO work was done largely in Europe. This fracture was exacerbated by
Welless abiding interest in deconstructing the rst-person-singular gure of
excess, which was increasingly out of synch with American culture.
By 1954 Welles had become a comic reference in Hollywood, spoofed by
commercial successes like Bob Hope.62 Whereas the threat of fascism had

ORIGINS OF THE FIRSTPERSON SINGULAR

encouraged Welless critique of the power of the iconic rst person, the threat
of communism shifted national rhetoric toward a fear of lost individuality.
In the context of the Cold War, Kane looked like a heroic gure, championing American capitalism and the free press. Welles himself was increasingly
situated as an outsider, not a member of the nationalist (anticommunist)
team of Hollywood insiders, and his personality-driven brand moved to
the margins of American culture, eventually becoming an expatriate product
with European associations.
Ironically, considering his thematic preoccupation with the critique of
individual power, Welless short-term marketing strategy in the 1940s suffered from an embrace of individual artistic production at the expense of
collaboration. Publicly, Welles began to disavow creative partnerships. He
broke with Houseman and became embroiled in a controversy with Herman
Mankiewicz over script credit for Citizen Kane. Welless rising stardom
inhibited the Mercury, which went from an experiment in peoples theater
to a trademark for a star.63 In his incisive analysis of the Mercury aesthetic,
Michael Denning notes that the Mercury Theatre was caught between the
politics of the popular front and the corporate elitism of RKO and Henry
Luce.64 The result was a peoples theater without the people,65 even though
Welles himself remained an instinctive populist and ardent antiracist who
despite a storied arrogance reveled in collaborative exchanges with almost
anyone in his path.66
The long-term benets of Welless isolationist marketing strategy, however,
ensured the durable legend of Welles the auteur that continues to hold great
sway with critics and fansyet it also ensures critical neglect of some of his
most interesting work. Projects deemed less authentically Wellesian than
others because they are collaborative or incomplete tend to be given less
attention. As Lorna Fitzsimmons argues in her analysis of The Magnicent
Ambersons, for years Welless loss of control functioned as both a catchall explanation for the lms imperfections and a rationale for engaging
in commentaries limited by their auteurist assumptions.67 In this way, the
Wellesian brand was at odds with Welles-the-man, and his brand took on
the connotation of Outcast Genius, an association that ensured its position
at the periphery of the studio system.
Welless working style never really matched his billing as individual genius.
He took the collaborative Mercury Theatre ideology to Hollywood, and a
CBS press release dated November 30, 1939, announced that Welles as a lm
director wishes to continue the rehearsal system he has always adhered to
in his Campbell Playhouse broadcasts.68 He anticipated keeping the actors
wholly involved in the production, retaining Bernard Herrmanns musical

ORIGINS OF THE FIRSTPERSON SINGULAR

accompaniment and following the Group Theater method of working

over a play so that actors could if necessary, ad lib their scenes. He also
articulated his concept for an emerging visual rhetoric, which would show,
from the standpoint of the camera, how the story is to unfold and what the
camera will see, since a movie script is more a record of what is seen rather
than what is heard. A direct challenge to classic cinema techniques was
clearly announced as well: This unusual blend of broadcasting and recording
technique with established motion picture practice is a radical departure
in Hollywood procedure and already the Orson Welles Plan has aroused
wide-spread discussion.69 Welless collaborative rehearsals, nontraditional
scripting, and visual experimentation resulted in markers of his brand that
would be at odds with its commercial viability.
Commercially, the Orson Welles Plan reects the desire for co-branding
between radio and cinema. At rst, the Mercury Theatre tried to reassure
radio sponsors like Campbell Soup that the move to cinema would be mutually benecial. Houseman wrote sponsor Ward Wheelock on July 27, 1939:
Many radio stars have made appearances in pictures but no recognizable
and complete radio show with its formula intact has ever before been made
into a motion picture. 70 CBS integrated Housemans language in their own
marketing plan, incorporating the idea of a radio show translated into cinema in a press release four months later, Welles Uses Radio and Recording
Techniques in Readying First Film. 71 The press releases emphasis on improvisational rehearsal techniques and actor-driven productions undermines
the myth of Welles as a solo scriptwriter while highlighting the arrival of
the Mercury Theatre in movies.
The tension between marketing a rst-person star and a collaborative
creative enterprise created a short-term crisis that compromised Welless
standing with RKO. Over the long term, however, the iconography of the
Wellesian brand depended not just on the rst-person singular as incarnate
in Welles himself but on a general fascination with the American rst person,
with an exploration and erosion of a national I. Welless own contradictory
positions as an American expatriate and a star who worked collaboratively
make his body of work increasingly relevant to viewers interested in the
contradictions (and failures) of postmodern subjectivity. Over the course
of Welless career, his work came to evoke the diculty of constructing the
concept of I, and his brand returned to cultural relevance.
I/Eye on America: Welless RKO Projects
Although this chapter is primarily concerned with the rst-person-singular
component of the Wellesian brand, this narrative style is interwoven with

ORIGINS OF THE FIRSTPERSON SINGULAR

three other styles discussed in later chapters: the adaptation of classics, use
of modernist primitivism, and the exploration of the truth-ction binary. In
any Wellesian production one of these components might be highlighted,
but usually several are present. When we look at three of his RKO projects,
two unnished and one nished, the interplay of the rst-person singular
with the other styles readily emerges. In addition, it becomes clear that the
Wellesian rst person in these early projects is explicitly positioned from an
American perspective. These projects evoke conicts within and between
personal and American identity, often as challenged by increasingly global
contexts. Each project engaged American identity, even though Heart of
Darkness and the Christ project needed signicant adaptation to address
these issues. Moving from Kurtz to Kane to Christ, the latter half of this
chapter studies Welless earliest proposed RKO projects specically in terms
of their use of the rst-person singular and a national context.
The Imperial I: Heart of Darkness
The diculty of translating Welless rst-person narrative strategy from
radio to lm is illustrated by his rst RKO lm project, Heart of Darkness.72
Welles had already adapted Heart of Darkness for radio in 1938 as part of
the First Person Singular series, and he was eager to reproduce on lm the
theoretical dimensions of the rst-person narrator he had established in that
radio broadcast. First Person Singular often adapted novels that had a strong
oral/aural component, and as Spadoni notes, Conrads Heart of Darkness
already contains three levels of performance: reading, listening, and seeing.
The reader reads the novel itself but shifts into the position of listener on
the Nellie and then sees Kurtz and the river through visual imagination.73
Radio broadcast could explore the listening/seeing tactics of the novel more
thoroughly than lm because radio could mimic the narrative frame of the
novel, aurally positioning the listeners as though they were on the Nellie,
and then requiring them to visualize Kurtz and Marlows story through
imagination rather than direct visual representation.
Aural narrative can not only transmit an authorial I directly to the listener but also extend this rst-person perspective to more than one central
character. In fact it was common for radio actors to play more than one
character and for more than one character to narrate. This strategy is echoed
in Welless approach to the radio adaptations of Charles Dickens, which
employed more than one central narrator. In Welless Tale of Two Cities, for
example, three characters speak directly to the audience: Manette, Carton,
and Lorry; his later Oliver Twist splits the narration between Oliver and
Mr. Brownlow.74 In contrast, classic Hollywood lms sparingly used even a

ORIGINS OF THE FIRSTPERSON SINGULAR

single voiceover narrator. Welless proposal for a cinematic Heart of Darkness

reects his previous radio experimentation, even in his original plan to play
both Marlow and Kurtz (apparently a short-lived idea). If he had played both
roles, he would have awkwardly split Marlows narrative voicedisguise only
goes so far, particularly when it comes to Welless distinctive vocal tones,
and an audience was sure to be confused by Welless voiceover as Marlow
meditating on his body playing Kurtz.
A second problem posed for Welless translation of this text from radio
to lm was that the use of the camera to evoke the aural added a layer of
complexity to the act of lming, as well as to the narrative structure. Welles
wanted to experiment with using the camera to express two narrative perspectives engaging each other and the audience. Even if he had been able to
extend the traditions of classic cinema in this way, it was almost impossible
to achieve the eects Welles desired without breaking RKOs budget and
extending shooting for an unacceptable amount of time. So, despite the fact
that roles had already been cast and actors were on salary, the project was
shelved by RKO at a substantial cost. Welles was nding his ideas dicult to
translate into the medium of lm, which oered more tantalizing technical
possibilities than either stage or radio but imposed limitations as well.
Conicts of national identity were central to Welless vision of Heart of
Darkness, and his opening relocates the frame story from the Thames to
the Hudson. Aurally, it also situates the exotic within the United States, as
snatches of jazz music are heard from the radios in the moving taxicabs. 75
Heart of Darkness is thus set in the context of a distinctly American rstperson singular, framed within the discourses of nationality and selfhood.
In his study of this unmade lm, Naremore suggests that by substituting
the eye of the camera for the I of Conrads narrator, the camera would
become Marlow, whose voice, that of Welles himself, would be heard oscreen. 76 This dichotomy of I vs. eye appears clearly and explicitly in the introduction to Heart of Darkness in which Welles actually oers it as a graphic
equation (see Figure 1, in the gallery).77 Critics have analyzed this opening
in depth, and Spadoni, Naremore, and Guerric DeBona all oer persuasive
readings of it as a potentially powerful piece of cinema. The correlation between its visual manipulation and the aural strategies Welles employed on
the radio series First Person Singular are clear: Welles was seeking a lmic
equivalent of the kind of identication that novels can eect in readers, and
that his own Mercury radio showsubtitled First Person Singularroutinely
evoked in listeners. But the world of the camera is very dierent from that
of the microphone, and the heavy-handed self-referential approach that
Welles proposed would have been at odds with classical cinematic tech

ORIGINS OF THE FIRSTPERSON SINGULAR

niques, which are designed to make the viewer identify seamlessly with the
inhabitants of the visual world of the cinema. Didacticism does not lead to
identication in cinema, and Welless powerful, iconic voice did not hold
the same sway in the visual world that it had in the aural world. As Spadoni
succinctly summarizes, the more Welles insists on his formulas i, the
more the yous proliferate. 78
During the introductory sequence, Welles guides the audience into a
personal interaction with the lm by means of visual tricks. First he cages
them; then he takes them into the death chamber, all the while using the
camera as a surrogate for the viewers eyes and using direct address to
personalize the experience. Welles maintained this process of creating an
individual sensory and psychic experience via performance as a central value
throughout his cinematic career. DeBona aptly assesses the promise of this
innovative opening sequence, saying it would have been a remarkable piece
of cinema in part because of its innovative use of a visual rather than aural
rst person.79 Perhaps the best way to envision the possibilities and limitations of his opening is to review the canary sequence:
Introduction: This has no direct connection with the motion picture
itself. It is intended to instruct and acquaint the audience as amusingly as possible with the special technique used in The Heart of
Darkness.
Dark Screen. welles voice
Ladies and Gentlemen, this is Orson Welles. Dont worry. Theres
nothing to look at for a while. You can close your eyes, if you want
to, butplease open them when I tell you to . . . First of all, I am
going to divide this audience into two partsyou and everybody
else in the theatre. Now, then, open your eyes. iris into Int. Bird
Cage(Process)
shooting from inside the bird cage, as it would appear to a bird inside
the cage, looking out. The cage lls the entire screen. Beyond the bars
can be seen chin and mouth of Welles, tremendously magnied.
welles voice The big hole in the middle there is my mouth. You play
the part of a canary. Im asking you to sing and you refuse. Thats
the plot. I oer you an olive.
A couple of Gargantuan ngers appear from below cage and thrust an
enormous olive toward camera, through bars of the cage.
welles voice (contd) You dont want an olive. This enrages me.
Welles chin moves down and his nose and eyes are revealed. He is
scowling ercely.

ORIGINS OF THE FIRSTPERSON SINGULAR

welles voice (contd) Here is a birds-eye view of me being enraged.

I threaten you with a gun.
Now the muzzle of a pistol is stuck between the bars of the cage. It
looks like a Big Bertha.
welles voice (cont.) Thats the way a gun looks to a canary. I give you
to the count of three to sing.
Welles head moves up, showing his mouth on the words, One, two,
three. His voice is heard over echo chambers and the narration is
synchronized on the count with the movement of his lips.
welles (contd)
One . . . Two . . . (on normal level, cheerfully) You still dont want to
sing so I shoot you.
The gun goes o with a cloud of smoke and a shower of brightly colored
sparks. As this fades out,
welles voice (contd) Thats the end of this picture. fade out
fade in
credit title [. . .]
black screen
welles voice Now, of course, this movie isnt about a canary and
I am not going to threaten you with rearms [. . .] but I do want
you to understand that youre part of the story. In fact, you are the
star. Of course, youre not going to see yourself on the screen but
everything you see on the screen is going to be seen through your
eyes and youre somebody else. Understand? (13)
This introduction contains all the hallmarks of the Wellesian rst-person
singular but articulates them through distinctly visual rhetoric. It includes
reexivity that shatters classic cinema techniques, direct confrontation between the narrator and the audience, a preoccupation with overlapping realms
of fantasy and reality, and even disavowal of portions of the text itself. If this
text has no direct connection with Heart of Darkness, why is it literally part
of the script? This urge to disavow the complexity of textual production is a
hallmark of the Wellesian brand. Disavowal is also a hallmark of the brands
endurance, since these are precisely the contradictions that establish the
continuing relevance of his brand for critics and scholars and that make his
process as relevant to postmodernity as his products were to modernity.
First-Person Plural: Controversy and Citizen Kane
Welles was able to realize parts of the visual rst-person singular in his
rst complete project for RKO, Citizen Kane, which is undoubtedly the

ORIGINS OF THE FIRSTPERSON SINGULAR

Wellesian product most discussed in terms of his use of this concept. The
Wellesian point of view in Citizen Kane oscillates between the objective
and subjective, driving the unattainable quest for the truth of Kanes
Rosebud. Tomasulo explores this division between subjective narration and
objective description in Citizen Kane, labeling implied authorial voice as
monophonic and ironic narrational agency as more polyphonic. Citizen
Kane establishes a style of authorial agency that narrates from the points
of view of the participating characters and describes from the viewpoint of
a more impersonal author.80 The ironic, or polyphonic, visual narration of
the lm is associated with diegetic rupture or self-reection. Tomasulo sees
this most clearly in the Thatcher sequence, which shows many marks of
direct address between lmmaker and spectator by rupturing the seamless
transparency of the diegetic world.81
There are at least three perspectives at work in the Thatcher sequence:
that of the reporter Thompson reading Thatchers report, Thatchers own
version on the page, and the audiences interpretation of certain events that
are shown on screen but cannot be known to either Thompson or Thatcher.
As we read Thatchers story over Thompsons shoulder, we see it transformed
into a visual drama. Within this drama are images clearly not generated by
either Thatchers words or Thompsons imagination as he reads those words.
Thatcher does not see Rosebuds importance, for example, and therefore
would not put it at the center of the visual eld as the young Kane plays or
once the sled is relegated to storage within Kanes subconscious. These images are from the polyphonic discourse. They are the images of the audience,
of Kane himself, of the lmmaker, or of Truth. The unstable economy of
discourse that results from the conjunction of the cameras voice (objective
Truth) and the characters voices (subjective experience) has kept critics and
consumers interested for many years.82
The visual rhetoric of Kane exposes the subjective construction of reality
at several points, perhaps most notably by juxtaposing the March of Time
sequence regarding the life and death of Kane with the beginning of the
audiences and Thompsons quest for alternate visions of the inner life of Kane.
This sequence creates a schism between the public and private concepts of
I, especially when contrasted with the subsequent personal perspectives
of characters who knew Kane. As William Simon summarizes, the truth
value of the March of Time sequence is challenged by the competing
versions of Kanes life83 In the prewar context of Citizen Kanes theatrical
release, to question the scenario of a newsreel was a radical act, foreshadowing Welless future (conicted) role as national propagandist during his nal
RKO project, Its All True.

ORIGINS OF THE FIRSTPERSON SINGULAR

By creating in Kane a national icon84 who is yet unknowable, whose ultimate Truth remains inaccessible, 85 Welles again merged his cameras rstperson singular with nationalist rhetoric. Although Kane is an undeniably
strong image of an American protagonist, the form of the lm contests the
coherence of a national I. The visual I of Citizen Kane invokes the untrustworthy public rhetoric of Kane himself, and he becomes a model of modern
American subjectivity under interrogation. In addition, by linking Citizen
Kane to real events beyond the realm of cinematic fantasy, the March of
Time sequence in particular displays the ability of the Wellesian brand to
merge truth and ction and to integrate political relevance into the product.
In Citizen Kane, as Stephanie Dennison and Lisa Shaw note, populism and
propaganda are the form and content of the lm.86
Controversy was already part of the Wellesian brand by 1940, since he had
transformed performance into public spectacle with The Cradle Will Rock
and War of the Worlds, ensuring that he would come to Hollywood on a
wave of publicity.87 If anything, the sensation created by his radio controversy increased his public worth in the eyes of studio executivesin eect
War of the Worlds had established his brand name. Before he had released a
single lm, RKO was more than happy to exploit Welless public personality
as a key to his box-oce success. Press releases and interviews disseminated
the image of Welles as the talented sole creator of his high-prole productions. Richard OBrien raved over Welless courage to produce, write, cast,
direct and play a leading part in a picture.88 Citizen Kane eected a new
opportunity for controversy, however, in that it created a schism between
the collaborative working process on which Welles had relied and the growing rst-person mythology of his brand name. The very success of Welless
attempt to merge his directorial/authorial presence with the rst-person
visual rhetoric of Citizen Kane created the need to suppress the recognition
of Herman Mankiewicz as coauthor of the script, and the additional obstacle
of William Randolph Hearsts campaign against the lm could not have come
at a worse time for either RKO or Welles.
The Wellesian brand was part of a larger cultural shift toward commercialism in the 1930s that was particularly pronounced in radio: as Michael
Anderegg points out, the proportion of commercially sponsored programs
on NBC grew from 23.6 to 49.9 between 1933 and 1944, and commercial
sponsorship of shows on CBS increased from 22.7 to 47.8 during the same
period.89 By early 1941 Welles relied heavily on radio sponsorships for his
living. His attorney, Arnold Weissberger, expressed his own pleasure with
these sponsorships: I am all a-glow at the prospect of commitments for the
International Silver Theater, Cavalcade of America, and Campbell soup.90

ORIGINS OF THE FIRSTPERSON SINGULAR

Welless popularity was thus essential to his nancial survival. A single farcical appearance on the Rudy Vallee show with John Barrymore on December
19 earned him 1,700 during his midwinter scal crisis of 194041.91 RKO
regarded his personality and the public perception of him as the author of his
works as central to his box-oce prospects; therefore, both Welles and the
studio needed to maintain his lone-genius image at all costs, a desire clearly
shown in the controversy over the writing credit for Citizen Kane.
Welless contract with RKO stipulated that he should be the sole creator,
director, and star of his works. Wellesian drama was associated with both
quality and experimentation, a combination that RKO president George
Schaefer specifically brought Welles to RKO to reproduce. A prestige
producer, Schaefer was part of the RCA-Rockefeller group who wanted a
quality image.92 Yet the quality image had to turn a prot as well. Welles,
already known as an Innovator on Stage, [who] Experiments on the Air93
and who had turned radio to a New Art Form,94 t Schaefers ideal. At a
time when the average weekly salary for a radio employee was reported to
be 45.12,95 Welles was thought to earn between 1,000 and 1,700 a week
from radio alone.96 Schaefer hoped that he would bring the same high-prole
entertainment to lm and generate similar nancial returns. If he could do
that, he was welcome to sole credit.
The controversy over Citizen Kane emerged from two sources simultaneously: William Randolph Hearst and his adherents resented Kanes resemblance to Hearst, and Herman Mankiewicz wanted to be acknowledged for
his role in writing the screenplay. Mankiewicz had originally signed an agreement to sell his rights as author of the screenplay but began reasserting his
right to screen credit in the fall of 1940.97 The authorship controversy seems
to have erupted when Mankiewicz read a Louella Parsons column that quoted
Welles as saying he wrote Citizen Kane. A letter from Herb Drake to Welles
on August 26, 1940, described Mankiewicz as in the biggest fever yet over
the column, and reported him to have called Welles a juvenile delinquent
credit stealer beginning with the Mars broadcast and carrying on with tremendous consistency. According to Drake, Mankiewicz threatened to take
out a full-page advertisement in trade papers, send out wire stories, and let
Ben Hecht write a story for the Saturday Evening Post refuting Welless sole
authorship of the lm.98
Weissberger began advising Welles on how to handle this volatile situation, consistently recommending a combination of tact and threat. In a
letter on September 23, 1940,99 Weissberger counseled Welles: the fact that
you have the power to exclude him from credit under his agreement can
be used by you tactfully to indicate that your allowing him to have credit

ORIGINS OF THE FIRSTPERSON SINGULAR

is a matter of good will on your part. But the situation was complicated by
a recent Screen Writers Guild policy that demanded more recognition for
writers, and Mankiewicz threatened to take the matter before the guild. Such
publicity would defeat the purpose of omitting Mankiewiczs name from the
credits in the rst place. Weissberger acknowledged this when he wrote to
Welles on October 1, 1940:
it would be most imprudent to allow a dispute of this sort to be aired
before the Screen Writers Guild. To do so would defeat the very object
that we have in mind with respect to credit on the picture. It would
be unwise to deny Mankiewicz credit on the screen and have him get
credit therefor[e] through the press by publicizing his complaint.
Since Welles had been promoted as the new resident genius of Hollywood,
it would have been awkward to admit that his productionswhether on
stage, radio, or lmwere collaborations. As the rst major cinematic effort of the all-round genius, Citizen Kane needed to have his name on it as
director, star, and writer.
Welles helped diuse the threat of the solo authorship controversy by
returning to collaboration, this time in the form of the theatrical adaptation
of Native Son. Welless assistant Richard Baer replied to Weissberger that
they owed Mankiewicz money for the theatrical script for Native Son, soon
to open on Broadway under Welless direction, in collaboration with Houseman. Native Son stoked the res of public controversy with its interracial
relationships and Communist themes, and it gave Welles another chance at
successful collaboration.100 Baer suggested, For reasons which are obvious,
I think it might be well to pay one or both of these debts at this time.101 The
successful collaboration on Native Son fullled two of Welless immediate
needs: to have a bargaining chip in his negotiations with Mankiewicz and to
provide an inux of cash. Mankiewiczs ire seems to have subsided by January
1941, and he maintained his collaborative relationship with Welles.
The Mankiewicz problem preoccupied Welless attorney from September
1940 until January 1941. Baer reported to Weissberger that Mankiewicz had
conceded to Orsons wishes in the question of credits in the picture on January 3, but the Screen Writers Guild got involved anyway, alerting Weissberger
that even a shared screen credit would violate the ProducerScreen Writers
Guild Agreement, which stated that a producer could not claim screenplay
credit unless he had in fact written the screenplay without the collaboration of any other writer.102 However, as Weissberger was quick to point out
to Welles, the agreement was made in October 1940, after Mankiewicz had
waived his screenplay rights, and it was therefore inapplicable. Weissberger

ORIGINS OF THE FIRSTPERSON SINGULAR

emphasized that Welles would be further in violation of his RKO contract if

he conceded to Mankiewicz; he was already violating it with his slow production pace.103 A screen credit contract between Welles and Mankiewicz, dated
January 22, 1941, resolves the conict in a screen credit that would read:
Original Screenplay
by
Herman J. Mankiewicz
Orson Welles104
Add the Hearst controversy to the screenwriting controversy, and the
diversication of the Wellesian brand into cinema was in serious jeopardy.
At the January 1941 preview, Hedda Hopper immediately identied the
protagonist with her media mogul boss, causing Hearsts attempt to squelch
the lm even before its release. On January 8, 1941, Welles wrote directly to
Louella Parsons to explain that Citizen Kane was not about Hearst and that
any such rumors were a good deal of nonsense.105 His eort failed miserably, and Hearst was soon publicly at odds with RKO. A Newsweek article in
January 1941 emphasizes both the publics expectations for Welles and the
reasons for his growing tension with RKO and its president, George Schaefer.
The article points out that Welles, the No. 1 enfant terrible of the theater
and radio, had been known to ourish amid controversy. But the article
also reveals that Welles was losing the feeling of support that he sought
from Schaefer, reputedly the only studio executive allowed to read the full
script of Kane during production. Hearst was putting nancial pressure on
RKO by refusing to publish a word about the studio or its productions in
any of his numerous papers.106 This, in turn, put pressure on Schaefer as the
changing management of RKO continued to demand that he make the boy
wonder show prots rather than losses.107
The stress of losing Schaefers sympathy is obvious in a four-page, tortuous letter from Welles to Schaefer on March 6, 1941, begging RKO to release
Citizen Kane over Hearsts objections. The letter marks the dark midpoint of
an anxious phase for Welles that lasted from the January preview of Citizen
Kane until its eventual New York premiere on May 1. The letter is alternately
petulant, adoring, hostile, and depressed. Welles writes,
When all this trouble rst descended upon us, we spoke almost twice
daily by phone. Now I have to sit up until four oclock in the morning
trying to get in touch with you and failing to do so[. . . .] I cannot think
you are deliberately avoiding me. I can only suppose that you are pursuing some policy the nature of which must be kept secret[. . . .] Always

ORIGINS OF THE FIRSTPERSON SINGULAR

remember that I well know youre the best man Ill ever work for, but
do try to realize that you owe both of us something better than what
I now receive[. . . .] I must know if I overrate our friendship. Maybe
all I owe you in my turn is the two moving pictures called for in our
contract[. . . .] Maybe thats all you want since you know thats what
youll get.108
Finally, Welles voices his fear that his audience is turning on him: My mail
is one long accusation from the American public which truly believes I have
sold out. . . . My nights are sleepless and my days are a torture. Worthy of
a key place in an epistolary novel, this outburst from Welles symbolizes not
only a personal dark night of the soul but a desperate turn in his overall
aesthetic and recognizes an emerging threat to the popularity of his brand
name. It appeared that even when a lm project was completed, there were
to be inherent marketing problems with Welless use of a larger-than-life,
rst-person singular in lm, particularly when it was combined with the
exploration of the line between fact and ction.
One remarkable sequence in Citizen Kane portends his next RKO proposal
for a Life of Christ. Between the retrospective snow scene in the Thatcher
sequence and Kanes emergence as an adult icon, Kane matures by twenty
years. At the same time, the scenes themselves move from Christmas to New
Years Eve. As Tomasulo notes, the symbolism evokes the eight-day Biblical
passage from birth to circumcision, from infancy to the ritual of coming into
manhood.109 The larger-than-life treatment of Kane as an American icon left
Welles with a logical trajectory: to pursue the ascendancy of the rst-person
from Kurtz to Kane and on to Christ.
Deication of the First-Person Singular: Life of Christ
We know much less about Welless Life of Christ than about either of the
other RKO projects discussed here, but it remains a suggestive culminating
example of his cinematic exploration of the rst-person singular. Following
Kurtz and Kane, Welles played with the idea of doing a version of the life of
Jesus Christ, who would be relocated to the United States.110 Welles, of course,
would have been the omnipotent director and star. In part, the opportunity
to handle a controversial subject correctly drew Welles to the project. The
Christ project would show o several hallmarks of his brandan ultimate
rst-person singular, a politically relevant topic, and an experimental interpretation of a (or the) classic piece of literature.
Welles had already used his iconic voice to play the supernatural role of
the Shadow on radio. He had often used voice-over to create the sense of a
voice of God, condent because omniscient, demanding that we hearken

ORIGINS OF THE FIRSTPERSON SINGULAR

to it and interpret our situation in relation to its message.111 Certainly this

omnipotent persona pervades the introductory sequence of Heart of Darkness as well. The Life of Christ promised to embody characteristics of two
other roughly contemporary projects as well: the religious controversy that
had resulted from his radio production of Liliom in August 1939 and the
emerging idea for Its All True, which was originally conceived as a medley
of various stories of North American identity.
In the Liliom controversy, which lasted from August to November of 1939,
Welles had to defend his creative freedom against attempts at censorship by
religious organizations. Liliom, best known as the basis for the later musical
Carousel, represents scenes of heaven and the afterlife that were deemed
controversial, and Welles felt frustrated and yet intrigued by the challenge
of bringing it to broadcast. The greatest problem identied by Catholic organizations was the representation of heaven in an entertainment medium,
and as a result Welles agreed to drop a scene in heaven.112 The Wheelock
agency for Campbell Soup negotiated script approval with the Catholic
Charities and Publicities Bureau to minimize controversy, a process that
Welles and Houseman grudgingly accepted. On November 4, 1939, Welles
wrote to Ward Wheelock, explaining an article in the Philadelphia Record
by Leonard Lyons that quoted Welles as lamenting the burden of censorship.
Welles explained,
The basis of the Lyons crack was a remark I made in Liederkranz Hall to
two or three Columbia [Broadcast System] people who were bedeviling
me with censorship on Liliom. I said [. . .] I thought the best thing to
do would be to just go on the air and read the Bible, which would all
be censorable but uncensored.113
Liliom aired on October 22, 1939, with Helen Hayes as guest star. Highlighting the controversial nature of Molnrs original tale, Welles introduces the
story as one that was rst suppressed. But he calls the tale an incredibly
beautiful and beautifully incredible little fantasy, positioning it in the realm
of magic.114 He describes fantasy as the highest reach of the mind. It is our
rst conclusion and our last. A tall story was told after the rst re that
was ever built. And we havent outgrown magic even if we know better.115
Welles frames the violent story as a fable, emphasizing the unreal qualities
of the work, a contrast to the infusion of contemporary politics into works
like his theatrical Julius Caesar and cinematic Citizen Kane, although he
does relocate Liliom to an American setting. Demonstrating a uid move
between commerce and fantasy, Welles uses the fabulous to hawk the mundane, saying,

ORIGINS OF THE FIRSTPERSON SINGULAR

Liliom [sic] like all fables, is dedicated to the proposition that the unlikely is not unnecessary. That you and I are interested in the impossible, that even in these times there is time for . . . once upon a time
. . . (MUSIC UP . . . THEN DOWN) But before our play begins, Ernest
Chappell I know, has a comment to make on a food preference of most
people. Mr. Chappell116
Chappell then connects the magic of entertainment to sponsor Campbell
Soup, extolling the magic, matchless avor of tomato soup.117 This transition from storytelling to salesmanship was a hallmark of Welless radio
series, embodying the intersection of entertainment and commerce that
Schaefer hoped Welles would bring to RKO. Having successfully negotiated
the religious controversy of Liliom, Welles proposed Life of Christ less than
a year later and set out to get prior approval for his project from various
religious factions.
In August 1940, Welles sent letters to the heads of several religious congregations to see how they might feel about a lm depicting an American
Christ.118 Several respondents articulated a vision of Welles as an American
icon, one of the few men worthy of assuming the Christ role. One major worry
that echoed the concern regarding Liliom had to do with the humanization
of Christ, but additional problems surfaced as well, including the potential
erasure of Christs rejection by the Jewish community, and the inability of
Hollywood to adopt a sacred tone for a sacred text. The reactions of clergy
to Welless proposal were mixed, but even rejections of the idea tended to
praise the potential pairing of Welles and Christ.119 The president of the
American Unitarian Association expressed concern that an American Christ
would fail to reect the proper Christian spirit as exemplied by the Corpus
Christi cycle:
the inherent diculties, from both the artistic and the religious points
of view, seem to me so appallingly great that your courage leaves me
breathless with admiration but pretty thoroughly skeptical as to the
outcome. Your suggestion that the story might be told simply in the
spirit of a folk passion play makes me wonder whether you have hold
of the right end of the stick[.]120
The Rev. William Barrow Pugh of the Presbyterian Church, Oce of the
General Assembly, took a more optimistic view:
Frankly, I think your idea of a motion picture of the life of Christ is a
most commendable one. I have often wondered why more was not done
in motion pictures so far as portraying the Bible and its real message is

ORIGINS OF THE FIRSTPERSON SINGULAR

concerned. Certainly the life of Christ, developed as I know you would

do it, would be of inestimable value in these days.121
He indicates that he is aware of Welless work from reading magazines and
suggests if any one could do what you set forth in your letter, that man would
be yourself. Viewing the project with a more detached interest, George
Tucker of the Protestant Episcopal Church indicates that he is extremely
interested in the project and that its general lines seem proper and wise.122
L. R. Scarborough, president of the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, agrees in a short, professional note that there are possibilities for great
good, if it can be done in the proper way.123
The willingness of clergy to accept this project specically because Welles
would be at the helm indicates the emerging power of his cinematic brand.
If one regards these religious organizations as investors in the Christian
religion, they can be heard weighing whether or not an alliance with Welles
might lead to an increase in the popularity of their own product. Christian
leaders were already interested in using Hollywood to spread their message,
and Pugh mentions that his own meeting with a representative of the Hays
oce had given him very real ideas as to the power of the motion picture
industry to portray the ner aspects of life.124 Once again, Welles would
function as a type of spokesperson, but this time he would be selling audience identication with Christ.
The two most interesting and detailed responses, however, were from
F. H. Knubel and Msgr. Fulton Sheen. The suggestions of these two men
(and Welless responses to them) reveal a great deal about the reasons for the
absence of a culminating rst-person singular project for RKO. Both men are
generally supportive but oer very specic warnings based on prior cinematic
representations of Christ and on Welless own proposed reinterpretations of
the story. Knubel, of the United Lutheran Church, approaches Welless work
as one of artistic devotion, instructing Welles, this eort of yours must be
devout.125 Knubel also stresses that Welles should adhere closely to the gospels, being sure that no important omission or addition so far as the Gospel
of the life of Christ is concerned. He demands that the resurrection must
be shown, not just the death. Furthermore, he oers a cautionary critique
of Cecil B. DeMilles 1927 lm, The King of Kings, in which the high priest
uttered a startling statement that he alone of his people was responsible for
the death of Jesus. This was naturally introduced so that there would be no
objections from Jewish sources of the present day. Knubel argues, I am very
far away from any anti-Semitic thoughts in my own heart but this introduction [. . .] destroyed for me the value of that picture when I saw it a number

ORIGINS OF THE FIRSTPERSON SINGULAR

of years ago. The political question of how to portray Pontius Pilate and the
Jewish community remains central to current commercial adaptations of
the Christ story, a legacy of tension that is further discussed relative to Mel
Gibsons The Passion of the Christ (2004) in the nal chapter of this study.
Msgr. Sheens letter gives a bit more insight into details of Welless proposed
project, replying specically to several propositions by Welles and stressing
Sheens own position as a savvy Hollywood insider and a well-read humanist.
Sheen argues that Welles is quite right in assuming that the Church never
denies the artist the right to point. You are also to be most heartily complimented in your resolve to handle this tremendous theme without incurring
the displeasure of the Church.126 His main points of concern are that Welles
should preserve the divine nature of Christ and retain the theme of Christs
rejection by the Jews. He suggests that Welles present Christ as what He is,
namely, the Son of God. The exclusion of the miraculous and the ignoring
particularly of the Resurrection would be to a Christian the same mutilation
as to leave the Prince of Denmark out of Hamlet. By positioning the Bible as
a great book akin to Hamlet, Sheen takes a secular approach to the project,
treating Christ as a protagonist but also implying that Christ, like Hamlet,
would engage the audience in his own contemplations and choices. Like
Kurtz, Kane, and Hamlet, Christ could provide a powerful point of audience
identication within the performance narrative.
Sheen worries, however, that Welless attempt to move the story to an
American pastoral setting will erase the Jewish background of Christ and
his rejection by His own people, as well as create the artistic diculty of
presenting the Divine only through the human. Ultimately, however, Sheen
is supportive of the project, and even atters Welles: An extraordinary genius
of the Theatre such as yourself could probably do it in a way that would do
credit to the Theme and to the Theatre. He even oers to meet with Welles
while in Los Angeles for a lecture.127
Welless response to Sheen less than a month later on October 3, 1940,
claries that the lm will be a miraculous tale, bringing the supernatural
into a familiar contemporary setting. Welles promises to present Christ
as true God and true Man and promises that his adaptation would not
modernize the theme to the extent of eliminating the miraculous. He reassures Sheen,
Nor is my choice of an un-Asiatic setting a choice intended to deny,
even by intimation, that Christ is God[. . . .] A miracle was no less
miraculous in Galilee than it is in Texas but the centuries, (at least for
many, many of us who contemplate His story,) have invested the world
in which Christ lived with the gauzy unreality of a fable.128

ORIGINS OF THE FIRSTPERSON SINGULAR

Invoking the original mission of the Mercury Theatre to bring the classics to
the masses, Welles argues, I want to make a motion picture of the Story of
Christ for everybodynot just those who know it to be true. I believe I can
impress everybody with the truth of the story.129 Welles seems eager both to
please institutional powerin this case, the churchand to edify the masses,
two recurrent aspirations of the Wellesian brand. He asserts,
I am terribly anxious to oend no orthodox sensibility. In all candor,
however, I must admit that I am more anxious still to impress the unconcerned[. . . .] Please believe that I would never dream of giving my
eort to such an undertaking if I were convinced that in any particular
such a picture ran contrary to the wishes of the Church.130
In this letter Welles sounds distant from the maverick genius reputation
that he would later embrace, quite willing to appease inuential persons and
their constituencies in order to get his work completed. However, he stresses
the centrality of his experimental interpretations of classic works, in this
case his desire to explore an American vision of Christ:
I speak of my projected setting as American. By this, I mean that
the pictures esthetic will be, as much as possible for an American
audience a negation of any period sense. Accept my assurance that I
do not contemplate any attempted subtraction from the Divinity of
Christ, but rather, in a special theatre sense, a fresh armation of
that Divinity.131
Even at this early point of his career, Welles recognizes the anticommercial
nature of his interests, or rather expresses a desire to extend the boundaries
of what was regarded as commercially acceptable. Defending the potential
divinity of his American Christ, Welles writes, Were [the portrayal of a
Divine Christ] not my sincerest intention, I should, of course, have chosen
merely some God-like man rather than God Himself. And the commercial
success of such a picture, as I am sure you will understand, would have been
somewhat more assured.132 Here, Welles alludes to Citizen Kane and his
preoccupation with the rst-person singular, the godlike man who dominates
his most successful commercial project. In his long response to Msgr. Sheen,
Welles defends his ability to create an America abstracted from history and
an American gure of divinity, even at the potential risk of commercial
viability. Of course, paradoxically, Welless desire to risk commerce for art
would eventually become yet another aspect of his cinematic brand and part
of its long-term appeal.
The Christ project would have proved an interesting study in the development of the Wellesian rst-person singular. By taking on Christ after Kurtz

ORIGINS OF THE FIRSTPERSON SINGULAR

and Kane, Welles envisioned a trilogy that would have traced the development of subjectivity, of the I through three incredibly important modes of
conquest: imperialism, capitalism, and religion.133 And while it is a loss that
this nal lm does not exist in commercial form, the clear residue of the
Wellesian I remains in his commercial brand. In some ways this unnished
project reveals more about his evolving cinematic style than do the polished
surfaces of Citizen Kane and The Magnicent Ambersons. The Christ project
and Heart of Darkness are Wellesian in conception rather than execution, but
they also open possibilities for readership and interpretation that are closed
or nite in the nished lms. Somewhere in a barren Texan plain, Welless
Christ gure saunters toward the horizon (does he wear spurs? carry a gun?),
unnished on lm but fully realizable in the Theatre of Imagination, which
was after all, Welless rst theater.
These rst RKO projects reveal that even at its earliest stages, the Wellesian
brand depended on the larger-than-life rst-person, which ultimately is not
embodied in any single character but in Welles himself. Although Welles
missed his chance at box-oce popularity, he won the contest of image and
prestige. In notes for a speech during 194041, Welles clearly articulates a
vision of his rst-person singular role in relationship to the development of
a cinematic name brand:
There has never been a picture of consequence that has not been the
product for the most part of one manthe man who dominates the
making of the picture. This man can be the producer, the director, the
writer, the star or even the cameraman. Pictures invariably achieve the
level of this dominant personality.134
Ultimately, this vision was realized, and Wellesindependent of RKO,
George Schaefer, or any Hollywood studiobecame a symbol of American
prestige in lm, an American auteur and an iconic American brand.
Over the course of his career, the Wellesian brand subsumed Welles himself, and many came to know him as a consummate spokesperson rather than
a consummate director. As Anderegg puts it, In the 1930s Welles was selling
soup by creating a productradio dramathat involved him in aesthetic
activity[. . . .] When, however, Welles sold Paul Massons wine [in the 1980s],
he was not creating a product: he was the product.135 During the RKO years,
Welles himself was not yet a household name. His brand of entertainment
was respected, but he was not a box-oce lure.
His inability to move from promoting a product as a spokesperson toward
being the product itself became a crucial obstacle to Welless success within
the Hollywood studio system. The general public would not pack a theater to

ORIGINS OF THE FIRSTPERSON SINGULAR

consume Welles-as-director. As an actor, Welles lacked star quality. He was

impressive but not seductive,136 and he was often placed in narratives that
challenged the expectations of mainstream audiences. The cult of stardom
demands a visible product, a body to draw the consumer into the spectacle;
therefore, directorial stardom proved useless to sell Welless lms, even as
it succeeded in selling Welles as a public personality. His products became
famous but not popular. The audience wanted to see movie stars, not the
products of their directors, and Welles was becoming rst and foremost a
star director rather than a star actor.137

2WP_cTa!
Classics for the Masses: Dickens and Welles
The star director will go out as quickly as the old time
star before him. He has begun to decline already.
Orson Welles, 1939
It is impossible to doubt, of course, that Welles
is an auteur in the fullest sense.
Grahame Smith, 2003

As developed in his radio series, Welless rst-person-singular approach to

adaptation depended on the insertion of a contemporary, critical eye/I into
a classic text. No author interested Welles more consistently than Charles
Dickens during the era of Welless shift from radio to Hollywood,1 in part
because of Dickenss cultivation of a performative style of literature that
explores the ssures between personal and public identity. Dickenss interest
in narrative experimentation evoked a complex, socially constructed, rstperson singular that fascinated Welles. Adapting Dickens as a classic author
also heightened the Wellesian brand by association. Finally, Dickensian
style translated well into Wellesian performance with its brief, serial form,
which included vivid visual scenes and populist themes. Welless adaptations of Dickens from 193840, which range from popular radio projects to
a proposed screen version of Pickwick Papers, reect the zenith of his use of
the serial form and the classic literary narrative. Classic adaptation, always
to remain part of the Wellesian brand, was essential to the initiation of his
relationship with RKO.
The association between Welles and fellow populist showman Charles
Dickens helped Welless career move from radio into lm, and established his
entertainment brand as both geared to the masses and culturally respectable.
Welless relationship to master authors enhanced (and continues to enhance)

CLASSICS FOR THE MASSES

his reputation as artist and was key to establishing the Wellesian brand. The
story of Welless evolving relationship with Dickens captures the process of
diversifying the Wellesian entertainment brand as it moved from radio into
lm. This diversication of his commercial potential suggests a key dierence between an auteur and a star director: the auteur, over time, establishes
a market presence based on elite credibility rather than mass popularity. A
classic rather than a star, the auteur often nds a niche market based on
perceived artistry rather than a mass market based on box-oce sales.
Whereas the next chapter will discuss the connection between Joseph
Conrads style of modernist expressionism and Welles, this chapter looks at
the aspects of authorship that he shared with Dickenss very dierent literary personality. Dickens, associated with popular culture and often credited
with creating mass literary circulation, blends the concepts of author and
entertainer, and provides an interesting counter example of Welless use
of literary adaptation when juxtaposed against Conrads high modernist
style. Critics have suggested that Dickenss writing style lends itself to visual
adaptation, arguing that his precinematic sensibility frames him almost as
prophet, and several critics link his narrative style directly to that of Welles.
For example, Grahame Smith suggests that Welless major stylistic tool,
his reliance on long takes made possible by deep focus, would have been the
perfect lmic embodiment of Dickens vision.2
Welles and Dickens are linked by their eorts to circulate their work
among the mass populace, to spread their art beyond elite associations. In
this way, Dickens and Welles share a certain vulgarity that outs the very
notion of classic by courting mass appeal. 3 Welles is similar to Dickens in
that he created a serialized form of literature-based popular entertainment
and that he was able to parlay his popularity into a lucrative career that paid
him as much to be a public personality as to be an author of texts (to the
great chagrin of the RKO studio executives).
From 1938 to 1941, Orson Welles underwent tremendous transitions in
his life, moving from theater to radio and then to lm, divorcing his wife,
breaking with long-time collaborator John Houseman, and encountering a
roller-coaster ride between public appreciation and derision. In July 1938, he
debuted his First Person Singular CBS radio seriesalso known as Mercury
Theatre on the Air and, later, as Campbell Playhouseintending to wed the
performance experimentation that he had brought to the Federal Theatre
Project with the income and commercial appeal that radio had consistently
aorded him since his 1935 appearances in March of Time.4 Over the course
of 1938, Welles produced four radio plays based on the work of Charles
Dickens: A Tale of Two Cities (July 25), Oliver Twist (October 2), The Pickwick

CLASSICS FOR THE MASSES

Papers (November 20), and A Christmas Carol (December 23).5 Dickens thus
became Welless most frequently adapted author in 1938. When he was lured
to Hollywood with an RKO contract in 1939, it was widely expected that he
would continue his practice of adapting the classics for the masses, and in
1940 rumors circulated about a pending production of The Pickwick Papers
to star W. C. Fields. This chapter explores why that lm never materialized,
and why after 1938, Welles became less reliant on classic adaptation, focusing
equally on experiments with the manipulative possibilities of subjectivity,
narration, and mass technology.
The First Person Singular Radio Series
Welless concept for the radio series First Person Singular represents an
aesthetic bridge between the visual performance concepts he had been
integrating into the theater, including multimedia experiments, and an increasing interest in bending the parameters of narrative identity that would
later infuse his cinema work. Welless work has frequently been associated
with bricolage or pastiche,6 and he freely borrowed from the aesthetic and
performative traditions of one entertainment medium to enrich another. In
the case of First Person Singular, Welless motive was twofold: to revitalize
literary classics for a mass audience and to establish himself as the rst-person-singular author of these cross-media performance studies.
Welles used one performance medium to whet the appetite for adaptations
in other performance modes, and he often translated texts among theater,
radio, and lm. CBS hoped to capitalize on the success of the Mercury Theatre in the preceding year by translating theater into radio and explicitly
promoted this concept in their June 8, 1938, publicity release for the debut of
First Person Singular.7 Following Dracula and Treasure Island, A Tale of Two
Cities was Welless third broadcast in this series, and its June 19 press release
promised Welles as the auteur of the productionresponsible for narration,
script preparation, and direction. Welles fed the public perception that he
was the sole creator of his theatrical, radio, and cinema productions, to the
detriment of his relationship with collaborators like Houseman and often
at the behest of commercial sponsors like Campbell Soup.
Dickens was an ideal choice for radio adaptation precisely because of the
similarities between his own serial form of writing and serial broadcast. His
works collapse into small scenes that are easily cut or rearranged and can be
separated in anticipation of a commercial break. In a way, the radio series
itself sought to emulate the type of mass literary popularity that Dickens attained. Upon Dickenss death the Illustrated London News observed that his
form of serial publication had given readers a sense of habitual dependence

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on their contemporary, the man Charles Dickens, for a continued supply of

entertainment which he alone could furnish.8 This is precisely the kind of
mass dependence on narrative that Welles sought to achieve with his weekly
radio series, oering himself as the voice of literary entertainment that could
glue America to the radio. The success of his strategy would be demonstrated
with his ability to create mass panic in The War of the Worlds broadcast,
during which the public clearly gave Welles an authority as entertainer that
nobodyincluding Welleshad previously anticipated.
In 1938 radio was proving to be the primary forum for narrative experimentation, and Welles articulated his goals for radio performance in First
Person Singular in an article for Radio Annual:
Looking ahead I see radio as a great eld for the presentation of literary
and poetic images; as the coming great eld for fantasy[. . . .] Radio can
do things which the realistic theater cannot and which, because of the
multiplicity of images, would be impractical in the lms. A few words
can conjure up a scene beyond the furthest extension of the powers of
the boldest and most resourceful technicians.9
Welless rst Dickens radio adaptation, A Tale of Two Cities, embodies the
narrative strategy he outlines in the above quote, particularly in terms of
using dual narrators to play with the listeners perceptions of time.
A Tale of Two Cities
Dickenss Tale of Two Cities t the needs of First Person Singular because it
both fullled Welless interest in the collapse of narrated time and oered a
variety of possibilities for experimentation with the retelling of the story in
rst-person singular. Welles made the banker Lorry the principal storyteller,
giving him the ability to collapse memory into present commentary, and offering the radio listener the sense of intimacy that he had set out to achieve
over the airwaves via rst-person narration. The performance actually split
the narration among Manette, Lorry, and Carton, thereby fragmenting the
listeners identication and creating a sense of three competing authors of
this taletwo of whom, Manette and Carton, were played by Welles. These
experiments with the collapse of time and perspective also mark his infamous
War of the Worlds broadcast, as well as much of his cinema work. The dual
narration strategy foreshadows his initial proposal to play both Kurtz and
Marlow in his unnished RKO Heart of Darkness. A Tale of Two Cities oered
Welles the chance to explore his lifelong personal and professional interest
in doubling. Michael Anderegg locates this theme once more in Citizen
Kane: Just as there are two Charles Foster Kanes . . . so there are two Orson

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Welleses, one an eccentric, dicult genius, the other a huckster and eternal
television personality.10 These Wellesian doubles are mirrored in Dickenss
huckster Carton and eccentric aristocrat Darnay, and Welles was no doubt
drawn to Cartons theatrical courtroom rescue of the restrained Darnay.
The doubling patterns of A Tale of Two Cities run from the most supercial
level of analysis through to the implicit structure of the narrative itself: it is
literally a tale of divided selves and cities. Often seen as a novel indicative
of its time, the Carton/Darnay split can be read as a Victorian expression
of anxiety, a reaction to the emotionally disturbed period which produced
it.11 The 1930s were an unsteady era as well, plagued by post-Depression
and prewar anxieties. Welless radio experimentation depended on merging
public and private narratives, taking public performance into the home, and
Welles wanted to create a sense of intimacy by capturing individual experience through collective broadcast. He wanted his own power as narrator to
be the connection with the mass of listeners, giving the feeling that he was
speaking to them each individually within the privacy of their homes.12
At the same time, however, he was profoundly aware of the breadth of
his new audience. In fact, he became a master of manipulating individual
experience within a mass performance, while remaining ambivalent about
the tension between his own reputation as a solo genius and his collaborative
working process.13 What better source for the expression of this ambivalence than Dickenss narrative, which Catherine Gallagher describes as a
nightmare of transparency, of publicly displaying what is hidden, intimate,
secret?14 Gallagher sees the revelations of the author as parallel to the courtroom exposures performed in A Tale of Two Cities and points out that this
complicated novel contains metalevel15 narrative doubling as well, producing
constant images of the public voice at odds with a private author.
Dickenss sense of theatricality makes him a natural choice for performance adaptation, and A Tale of Two Cities is often regarded as one of
his most theatrical works. Leonard Manheim describes the novel as impregnated with the spirit of the theatre in no small part because Dickens
conceived the work while he was acting in Wilkie Collinss The Frozen Deep
with his future wife Ellen Ternan.16 The theatrical quality of the novel may
have helped result in its popularity: Harold Bloom describes it as the most
popular of Dickenss books, with the exception of The Pickwick Papers and
the annual phenomenon of A Christmas Carol.17 Welles adapted each of
these novels as well during 1938, putting on a one-man revival of Dickenss
works as radio drama.
Dickenss work lent itself easily to Wellesian adaptation since, as Sergei
Eisenstein argues, Dickens achieves an optical quality that makes the

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visual image inseparable from the aural.18 Although Eisenstein is addressing cinematic technique, the oral/visual narrative quality is perhaps even
more essential to radio, where the performer must establish a relationship
with the listener through narrative alone, suggesting and evoking optical
scenes through aural experience. As Eisenstein observes, Dickens used
cinematic technique before the age of cinema, providing a clear example of
intertextual performance long before theories emerged to accommodate an
understanding of the complexity of his form. Before the technical equipment
to create cinema existed, Dickens employed lm techniques such as frame
composition and close-up. He even used a rhetorical dissolve in the nal
chapter of A Tale of Two Cities.19 Therefore, this text in particular begged
adaptation into an emerging performance media that could fully showcase
Dickenss narrative devices, and Welles could hardly have been unaware
of its highly successful lm adaptation starring Ronald Colman in 1935. In
fact, his awareness of this lm and the appearance of W. C. Fieldss David
Coppereld the same year probably prevented his consideration of them as
RKO adaptations in 1939, although their success for MGM may have sparked
RKOs interest in a Fields-Welles collaboration on Pickwick once the studio
had contracted Welles.
Both the text of A Tale of Two Cities and the radio play depict a constant
fear of exposure, particularly as it relates to narrative. Manette fears, and
the reader fears for him, the discovery of his hidden jailhouse narrative, a
narrative that ultimately threatens the security of his daughters happiness
and, in fact, her very life. Similarly, Darnay fears the exposure of the same
story, but from a dierent narrative origin. Manette and Darnay share circumstances of past plot, but each conceals his perspective on the St. Evrmonde plot within very dierent narrative forms. Darnays narrative exists
as lived past, whereas Manettes exists as recorded memory. Darnays past
is therefore always mutable, open to reinterpretation, whether by a jury or
by the reader. When Carton intervenes in Darnays story at his rst trial, he
alters reality by adding a layer of narrativehe transforms the story from
treason to twins. But when Manettes story is discovered by Defarge, it is
revealed as static truth, clear evidence against Darnay. The two French
trials are conated in Welless version, but in both the novel and the radio
play, the courtroom provides a forum for reinterpretation of Darnays past;
an audible struggle even ensues over who can control textual meaning for
the listener in Welless production. The Defarges turn the public tide against
Darnay by trumping Manettes spoken word with his written word, thus
ultimately controlling meaning and destiny.20 Carton alone remains as the
master-author, controlling the outcome of both trials, scripting his own

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death, and ensuring the legacy of its interpretation with his nal vision of a
beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss[. . . .] the lives for
which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful, prosperous and happy [. . .] Her
with a child upon her bosom, who bears my name.21
Welless production focuses on these anxieties of storytelling and interpretation, juxtaposing Manettes narrative with Madame Defarges knitting,
which Bloom calls a metaphor for the storytelling of the novel itself. 22 The
opening scene of Welless broadcast reveals Manette in prison, writing with
charcoal dipped in blood, the tale that he will hide but that will resurface.
This opening marks a shift from the draft manuscript for the broadcast,
which opened with Welles, as Jarvis Lorry, stating, This is a history of events
that took place in London and across the Channel in France in the years immediately preceding and during the great French Revolution. My name is
Jarvis Lorry. In the actual broadcast, Lorrys speech is moved to the end of
scene 2, therefore shifting the focus onto Manettes narrative within Lorrys.
The change in narrative progression eected a change in Welless own roles:
he was to play Lorry in the rehearsal script, but in the broadcast he plays
Manette and Carton. He thereby shifts the listeners point of identication
from the exterior observer to the writer-within-the-narrative, particularly
exploring the struggle to control meaning and the individual fear of being
misread by the masses, fears mirrored by the radio series itself. 23 Welless
notorious War of the Worlds broadcast only three months later would tangibly
illustrate the danger of mass narrative misinterpretation.
The changes between script and performance are interesting in several
ways. First, they once again show the improvisational and collaborative
method of Wellesian production, a method very much at odds with the
requirements of RKO studio structures of script production, marketing,
and editing. Welless style of radio adaptation was ill-suited to cinematic
modes of production, despite the studios expectation that he would be able
to translate his method into their structures. Thematically, however, the
last-minute changes in the production emphasized explorations of identity
as a negotiation between public and private selvesa hallmark of Wellesian
performance texts.
Oliver Twist
The script for the October 2, 1938, broadcast of Oliver Twist shows Welles
employing many of the same narrative conventions that he used in the earlier
Tale of Two Cities, including beginning in medias res, narrating the story
directly to the viewer via an interested observer (Brownlow in this case), and
splitting the aural identication of the listener. However, the eect of these

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conventions in the Oliver Twist broadcast are much less sophisticated in their
approach and therefore less powerful in their eect than that of Tale of Two
Cities. The performance emphasizes the progressive political aspect of the
Wellesian brand, subordinating rst-person constructions of meaning to
rst-person moralizing speeches. In addition, the pattern of narration does
not hold together well. Welless Oliver Twist often shifts between Brownlow
as a primary narrator and Oliver, who narrates sections of his life himself, to
the confusion of the script typist as well as the potential listener.24
The social critique present in the original novel remains a central focus,
and Welles echoes Dickenss criticisms of capital punishment, bureaucratic
waste, and government poverty policies, showing that a shift between generations and continents had not made these issues less relevant. Through the
character of the beadle, Mr. Bumble, the incompetence of Judge Fang, and
the meditations of Fagin on capital punishment, Welles matches Dickenss
balance between social reformer and showman.
The script makes extreme cuts in Dickenss text, particularly in the very
early and very late parts of the novel pertaining to Olivers life before London,
his evil half brother, and the mystery of his parentage. The broadcast opens
by dropping the listener directly into the scene of Olivers arrest for picking
Brownlows pocket. Using Brownlow to narrate the event allows the listener
to focus on Brownlows relationship with Oliver, but the confusing and
melodramatic mystery of Olivers identity in the novel is omitted from the
radio broadcast. In Welless broadcast, he is simply a stranger to Brownlow,
no more related to his interests or his family than any other street urchin.
Rose and her family are cut from the text as well, and thus the question of
Olivers parentage is omitted from this version entirely, with even the veiled
reference to his illegitimate birth crossed out in the rehearsal script.25
In line with this adaptations emphasis of social reform, the script keeps
a description of the parish boards decision to limit the diet of those in the
poorhouse to three meals of thin gruel a day, an onion twice a week, and
half a roll on Sundays.26 Olivers own direct request for more gruel (famously
present in the musical adaptation Oliver!) is kept only as a secondhand report from an outraged Bumble to the Chairman of the Board for the Parish.
The script privileges Brownlows retrospective, rational, social critique over
direct action, speech, or dialogue in many cases, making it a less immediate narrative than Tale of Two Cities. Since very little of the actual action of
the narrative happens to our rst-person narrator, the show suers from a
didacticism not present in the earlier adaptation of Tale of Two Cities.
The social message focuses in particular on capital punishment and child
welfare, and the Chairmans reaction to Bumbles story of Olivers request

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for more gruel is delivered directly to the audience and followed by a musical ourish:
bumble: Oliver Twist has asked for more.
voices: (general amazement) What! For What! . . .
chairman: That boy will be hung. I know that boy will be hung!
music . . .
Since the actual audio of the boys eating and Oliver asking for more is cut
from the draft script, the performance narrative favors the secondhand account by Bumble, followed by Brownlows assessment of the ensuing action
of the board: On the workhouse gate next morning a bill was posted oering
a reward for ve pounds to anybody who would take Oliver o the hands of
the parish.27 Thus the audience is directed to focus not on Olivers action
but on the governments perspective and role in his fate. In contrast to A
Tale of Two Cities, the rst part of Oliver Twist sounds more like an editorial
commentary on social policy than the immediate drama often associated
with Welless radio productions.
Welles even decided to take on a social issue that Dickens failed to confront, by softening the anti-Semitic rhetoric surrounding Faginnot referring to him as the Jew of Dickenss original text, for example. Instead, Welles
depicts him as an example of the failure of bureaucracy and capital punishment in the justice system rather than as Satan himself, the embodiment of
Christian fantasies of Jewish evil. Thus Welles keeps social critique while
reducing the pervasive anti-Semitism of the era, which is no small feat. Welles
may well have traded one ethnic stereotype for another, however, since the
draft script suggests Fagin speaks in Irish brogue and refers to his dangling
red hair as he faces the irate mob. In addition, the anti-Semitic connotations
of greed and cannibalism do remain from the original text.
One example of Fagins social critique occurs as he directly addresses the
role of capital punishment in increasing, rather than decreasing, crime, as
Oliver wakes and overhears him meditating on the topic while counting his
hidden treasure:
fagin: What a nd [sic] thing capital punishment is! Dead men never
repent. Dead men never bring awkward stories to light. Ah, its a
ne thing for the trade. Five of em strung up in a row, and none left
to play booty or turn white-livered.
In the radio version, the listener is left to ponder what Fagin means, since
we lack the background to contextualize his thoughts. At this point, Oliver
steps in to narrate his own story, and of course, Oliver cannot explain Fagins

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thoughtsthose of a criminal adultto us. This is a major problem in this

adaptation: the narrator is either Brownlow, who is largely uninvolved in the
events of the story, or Oliver, who is a child and therefore unable to explain
events fully. With Fagin playing a much larger role in this narrative than
Sikes or Dodger, the criminal mind becomes embodied in his voice, which
speaks rarely and in fragments.
Additionally, the use of Welles to play the violent Fagin splits the audience sympathies to confusing eect. Oliver and Brownlow appear on the
page as less interesting characters, but one could hardly imagine the listener
identifying with Fagin. Whereas the broadcast initially appears to critique
capital punishment through Fagin, it then places the listener in the position
of accepting it as his tting punishment at the end of the broadcast. In these
ways, the broadcast is at odds with itself structurally and thematically, although it is hard to interpret the eect of the actual broadcast from its only
currently available form, the draft script.
In another scene of social critique, Judge Fang represents an unfair, uncompassionate justice system, with Fang mainly represented as a series of
banging gavel sounds that override any attempts by Brownlow or the Police
Ocer to testify in Olivers case. The bookstall owner does not come forward
in the radio version to clear Oliver; rather Oliver tells his story about watching Dodger pick Brownlows pocket himself, directly to the listener and to
Brownlow. Brownlow oers to pay the ne for Olivers crime and takes him
away without external evidence as to his innocence. Oliver still faints at his
hearing, which allows for a well-placed commercial break, after which we
return to Brownlows home and (along with the disoriented Oliver) try to
learn more about our new surroundings. Narratively, Welles uses Dickenss
short literary scenes to t the space and design of commercial broadcast,
but to disorienting eect in this production.
In the second half of the broadcast, the elements of social commentary
are subordinated dramatically to melodrama via the character Nancy. Once
Oliver is kidnapped back to Fagins gang, the radio story departs radically
from the novel, cutting Olivers relationship with Rose, life in the country,
and the revelation of his parentage. Instead, Olivers attempt to break into the
country house with Sikes lands him with an anonymous Doctor, and Nancy
tells Brownlow where to nd him. The key scene that is retained from the
original, however, is Nancys murder scene.
Nancy is the only woman in Fagins gang in the radio script, and she has
a maternal connotation from the rst time Oliver describes her. The irony
of Dickenss description of Bess and Nancy as nice girls is gone, replaced
by the childs un-ironic view of Nancy: She wore a red dress and a great

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deal of hair hanging loose around her neck. She seemed to me a very nice
lady.28
With Nancy as an unambivalently sympathetic gure, protecting Oliver
from Sikess dog and telling Brownlow where to nd him, the violence of
Sikess murder of Nancy is made even more outrageous and sensational to
the listener. This scene puts violent melodrama very much at the front of the
production, and is gruesome in its use of literary and audio detail.
nancy: Bill, dear Bill, you cant have the heart to kill me! Bill. . . . Bill
sikes: Let go of me!
sound of blow
nancy: Bill, Bill, for dear Gods sake, for your own, for mine . . . stop
before you spill my blood! I have been true to you, upon my guilty
soul I have!
sikes: Let go of me, you devil, let go!
sound of club on her face
nancy: Bill! Bill! sound of another blow
nancy: Bill!
final horrible scream . . . then complete silence.
The use of complete silence in radio is a powerful tool, as Welless War of
the Worlds broadcast would again prove. The specicity of the sound cues is
startling (how does one create the sound of a club on her face in particular?)
But one can also assume that the violence, familiar to Welless listeners on
The Shadow, may have been riveting to the audience. Welles was nding ways
to thwart the censors and to exploit the gruesome possibilities of imagination. The very fact that listeners are not shown the details of Nancys death
allows them, with the help of audio cues, to imagine whatever scenario they
nd most horrifying.
Welless adaptation of Oliver Twist may have been less nely crafted than
his Tale of Two Cities, but he was clearly nding ways to push the conventions of sound use, literary adaptation, and narrative manipulation in ways
that would very shortly catapult him to fame via his Halloween broadcast. In
addition, he was emphasizing contemporary social critique in tandem with
mass entertainment, just as he had on stage in the Voodoo Macbeth and
antifascist Julius Caesar. This would be a persistent theme in his RKO cinema
career, and ultimately maintaining the balance between progressive politics
and entertaining art would test the limits of RKOs patience with Welles in
his incomplete projects such as Its All True and Heart of Darkness.
Even before the sponsorship of Campbell Soup, Mercury Theatre on the
Air was positioning itself as a showcase of auteur adaptation. In the buildup

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to the War of the Worlds broadcast, CBS promoted Welles rst and foremost
as an artistic master at adaptation of the classics. Dickens was a key author
in Welless collection of texts for adaptation, and only two weeks after Oliver
Twist aired, it was highlighted with the earlier Tale of Two Cities in the marketing of upcoming shows. A press release on October 20, 1938, was titled
Works of Wells, Dickens, Ibsen to be Mercury Theater [sic] Presentations.
The release outlined upcoming productions, including H. G. Wellss War of
the Worlds, and the November broadcast of The Pickwick Papers, to focus
principally on the famous court-room episode. It also referenced Welless
recent appearances as Oliver Twist, Sidney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities,
Brutus in Caesar and Rochester in Jane Eyre. By representing Welles as the
voice of Oliver (erroneously, according to the draft script, which lists Kingsley Coulton in the role),29 the press release suggests that Welles was simply
becoming associated with the voice of the lead in whatever masterwork he
had adapted, an association that reinforced Welless own desire to create an
image of himself as both star and director, and to transfer this image into a
lucrative Hollywood lm contract.
But even as he used the classics to present himself as the quintessential
rst- person-singular author of his productions, Welless work was heavily
dependent on a complex negotiation with audiences, sponsors, and fellow
actors. This transaction emerges clearly during his nal Dickens adaptation
of 1938, A Christmas Carol.
A Christmas Carol
A Christmas Carol diered from Welless earlier adaptations in that he
inherited this fourth and nal Dickens production from his commercial
sponsors, Campbell Soup. First Person Singular had now become Campbell
Playhouse, and this would be the fourth year of their popular presentation of
A Christmas Carol. As Guerric DeBona notes, Dickens became enormously
popular in the 1930s, and Christmas Carol in particular emerged as a cultural
icon. 30 The draft script for the show demonstrates a tight level of control anticipated by the sponsor, including casting the return of Lionel Barrymore as
Ebenezer Scrooge. Lionel had been sponsored as Scrooge by Campbell Soup
since 1934, although his brother John had to step in for him at the last minute
in 1936 when Lionels wife died. 31 The show was popular with the company,
the audience, and Lionel, and the sponsor wanted to integrate Welles into
this mix smoothly. The Suggested Carol Opening scripts the introduction
for Wellesa critical part of his vision of performance, the moment that
he felt established or lost intimacy with the audience. The script suggests,
Introduction from Orson Welles in New Yorkplanting fact that this is

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Campbells Christmas present to the listenerthat its the fourth year of its
presentation, etc. etc. (Wellesas Campbells spokesman). The script further anticipates the opening exchange between Barrymore and Wellesno
improvisation required: In introducing Barrymore, Welles makes use of the
phrase we have used for three years, in describing him:Americas grandest
character actor. To which Barrymore would respond how happy he was to be
there once again with, as much respect and admiration as I have for Orson
Welleswhom I might describe as Radios grandest actor.32
One could anticipate that this particular stage might be too small to
share, that Welles would not take pleasure in subordinating his performance
concepts (his own entertainment brand) to a soup company and its commercial traditions. Barrymore, suering from a sudden illness, reportedly
his crippling arthritis, never appeared. The actual performance concluded
with a Follow Script announcement: We are sorry that Lionel Barrymore,
our Scrooge in past years, was not able to come to New York to be with us
tonight but we hope that he will resume his pleasant habit next year. He
did, in fact, and Welles would return from Hollywood to play narrator to
Barrymores Scrooge in 1939. But by then, radio seemed more a source of easy
money than a forum for artistic experimentation for Welles.
Welles himself (in contrast to his RKO contract) was willing to share the
stage when it served the purposes of what he considered good entertainment
and good company. Almost exactly two years later he and John Barrymore
would parody themselves as Shakespearean actors who were also vaudevillian hacks on the Rudy Vallee show, 33 and Welles promoted his Campbell
Playhouse and later the Lady Esther series by bringing in other guest stars
to lure audiences to the show. The Lady Esther series had weekly surveys by
the rm Pedlar and Ryan to ascertain just which stars were crowd favorites,
as well as to gauge Welless own popularity. Anticipating this kind of commercial pressure even before he entered Hollywood, Welles prided himself in
his hucksterism, confessing to Time, I am essentially a hack, a commercial
person. If I had a hobby, I would immediately make money on it or abandon
it.34 This statement stood in stark contrast to Housemans attitude, which
led him to refer disdainfully to their sponsors for the Campbell Playhouse
as the soup people.35 But Welless own path was leading him in a dierent
direction from Houseman and the theater, as the Time magazine article
summarized: Nor does he want the Mercury to pin all its faith on the classics.36 Late 1938 seems to mark a turning point away from the coauthored
mission statement of the Mercury published by Houseman and Welles the
previous August, which explicitly focused on making the classics available
to the general public at a reasonable price.37

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Despite shared authority and credit, Welles was emerging even at this
stage as his own name brand. A May 1938 article in Time was, after all, simply titled, Marvelous Boy. As Welles moved the Mercury Theatre onto the
airwaves, radio permitted him to experiment with conventions of spoken
word and perspective in a manner that powerfully enhanced the impression of a dominant, singular, and personal voice. Radio allowed Welles to
experiment in ways that theater no longer oered, and he promised to treat
radio itself with the intelligence and respect such a beautiful and powerful
medium deserves.38 In a June 29, 1938, interview with the New York Times,
Welles emphasized his interest in language-as-performance, explaining,
Language never lives until it is spoken aloud.39 Radio oered an ideal medium to exhibit how his interpretation of language-as-performance would
adapt from stage to screen.
Welles was courting Hollywood even as he juggled continuing stage
and radio productions, seeking to widen his sphere of inuence within the
entertainment industry. In a speech to the National Council of Teachers of
English in New York, Welles lambasted theater in favor of lm, calling its
entertainment value vastly inferior to the movies.40 Radio could do things
that realistic theater could not, he argued in a draft manuscript of an article
for Radio Annual: A few words can conjure up a scene beyond the furthest
extension of the powers of the boldest and most resourceful technicians.41
Welles craved performance technology that could adequately convey his
ongoing absorption with rst-person perspective, and while radio oered
possibilities that theater did not, lm oered an even wider variety of possibilities for experimentation with narrative in word and image.
The Allure of Hollywood
Welles knew that ideas regarding the reinterpretation of the classics had a
market in Hollywood, but he wanted to hold out for an oer that would give
him artistic control over his works while securing the public perception of
him as a budding star directora dominant presence in the creation and
marketing of a distinct brand of entertainment. The perception of Welless
potential to ll this role palpably increased after his War of the Worlds production on Halloween of 1938.
The concept of the auteur had yet to be articulated (and it is still being
refined), but consumers were increasingly demanding identifiable, emblematic market personalities who transcended the role of spokesperson.
Welles had already emerged as a theatrical star by appearing on the cover of
Time in May 1938 for the Marvelous Boy article. The article pairs Welless
name with both the classics and modern adaptation by captioning his cover

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photograph George Orson Welles: Shadow to Shakespeare, Shoemaker

to Shaw. This balanced coupling of popular culture and high art would
become a hallmark of the Wellesian brand. Still, there were aspects to his
growing legend that caused him discomfort. The article suggests, He loves
the mounting Welles legend, but wants to keep the record straight. Stories of
his recent auence [. . .] annoy him.42 The ability to manage money eluded
Welles throughout his Hollywood career, and initially he was looking for a
lm deal that would help nance his other projects as well as his personal
lifestyle. He wanted an opportunity that matched his growing image and
that would diversify his name brand entertainment.
Before the RKO oer in 1939, he had already rejected an MGM contract
that required him to serve an apprenticeship under King Vidor.43 He also
rejected a 1937 oer from David O. Selznick but referred Selznick to Houseman as an able script selector and adaptor. Selznicks oer had not contained
a high enough prole for Welles, who responded in a letter that he would be
planning productions in which he would appear himself.44 Sidney Howard,
who worked with Selznick on Gone with the Wind, had also become aware of
the work of Houseman and Welles, and even if he did not take time to spell
either of their names correctly,45 he did take time away from nishing Gone
with the Wind to remark positively on their Federal Theatre production of
Dr. Faustus. Howard additionally suggested that they try a modern-dress
Julius Caesar, since he believed that the best way to stimulate the writing
of good modern plays is to keep the classics a part of what goes on.46 Welles
and Houseman did create a modern-dress Julius Caesar as their rst play for
the Mercury Theatre, and it opened to outstanding reviews on November
11, 1937, shortly after Howards note. Welles was aware of the importance
of knowing the right people to ensure the logistics of production, and he
worked hard to enhance his budding Wellesian brand. As early as 1937, he
was deemphasizing his creative reliance on Houseman and others to tap
into the small circle of Hollywood executives like Selznick who could help
secure a contract that would oer creative license as well as securitya type
of deal that had eluded others in Hollywood.
By 1939 Welles had landed his contract with RKO, a studio known for its
focus on creativity and independence in design,47 and his contract stunned
the media and Hollywood with its generous terms. The New York Times reported on August 20, 1939, Every one of the thousands of actors who have
passed through Hollywood during the last quarter-century has striven to get
the same kind of a deal but no one else has succeeded.48 When he ultimately
went to Hollywood, he went in style, renting the home of Mary Pickford
and Buddy Rogers, and creating a media stir over his starlike behavior. The

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contract was lucrative and lax in studio supervision, but it demanded a pace
of production that would become a severe problem for Welles. RKO wanted
Welles to reproduce the success of his radio reinventions of the classics,
and to produce these lms at a fairly rapid pace. After the debacle of the
never-completed Heart of Darkness, however, RKO and Welles would shift
their goals in diametrically opposed directions. RKO still wanted Welles to
remake the classics, while he turned away from this strategy for a variety of
personal and creative reasons, creating a breach that ultimately would force
him out of his contract and label him a high risk for other studios.
The signs of potential conict between Welles and the studio were present
in his earlier relationships with sponsors and colleagues, and even in the very
title of his series, First Person Singular. As James Naremore points out, a
more egocentric title one could not imagine.49 He had developed a reputation
as an enfant terrible by this point, and after the controversy over War of the
Worlds, the media referred to him alternately as a baby genius or a demon:
Marvelous Boy or Bearded Bogyman; Child or Hobgoblin of the Air.
Either way, the articles implied a decided lack of maturity and reliability.
Nevertheless, Welles held great commercial promise as an entertainer.
He was a master of disguise, a mercurial magician able to move uidly
between the poles of genius and madman. He could play roles of almost
any age and often delighted audiences with his exibility (see Figure 2).
Similarly, his radio work was the product of equal parts research, collaboration, improvisation and hucksterism. He would use much the same formula
for his lms, but cinema as a structure required more time and money to
implement his approach.
In part, Welless diculty with RKO developed out of his interest in constructing narrative from a rst-person-singular perspective. As discussed
more fully in chapter 1, his interest in representing stream of consciousness,
intersubjectivity, and deconstruction of reality contradicted his self-promotion as a commercial lowbrow entertainer. This unusual combination
of characteristics became a hallmark of Welless performances, one that
Anderegg traces through his study of Welles, Shakespeare, and popular
culture. Analyzing the ability of MGMs 1935 David Coppereld to bridge
the span between classic and popular, DeBona similarly remarks, Dickens-ness appealed to leaders of industry, the Arnoldian intellectuals, the
respectable middle class, and even the anonymous masses.50 Welles was not
only a signicant contributor to a culture that mingled the huckster with
the intellectual but also a product of it. To meet the demands of quick and
yet quality production, Welles turned to the literary classics, as he had on
stage and radio before.

CLASSICS FOR THE MASSES

Resisting RKO: The Economics of Experimentation

Through fall of 1939 and 1940, Welles was under economic pressure from
a variety of fronts, even as the nation itself was feeling the pressure of upcoming war involvement. First, Welless divorce from Virginia was causing
nancial strain; second, he chose to go on a lecture tour that underpaid
him and took him away from Hollywood during a critical period in fall of
1940; third, Citizen Kane was proving controversial both in its provocation
of Hearst and in its coauthorship controversy with Herman J. Mankiewicz;
fourth, he was having great trouble negotiating the demands of Campbell
Soup for his radio series; and nally, he was failing to fulll the rapid-pace
production that his RKO contract required of him. Both Welles and the
studio realized that he had to start working immediately on a new idea that
would rescue them.
Both the divorce and lecture tour put pressure on Welles in the fall of 1940,
as his correspondence with his attorney, Arnold Weissberger, indicates. Virginia was seeking additional funds to send their daughter, Christopher, to private preschool, and Weissberger was trying to avoid the additional payments
while maintaining the assertion that Welles was Christophers sole means
of nancial support in order to challenge the draft, if needed. In response to
Virginias request for a hundred-dollar initiation fee and twenty-eight dollars
a month for the school, Weissberger advised Welles that he would
stall Virginia along by slow correspondence until the rst numbers
under the draft are called. If your number should be chosen, I think
it would be feasible to oer to make the requested payments (which
are relatively small)[. . . .] If, on the other hand, your number is not
called, I will write Virginia that you have fullled your obligations to
Christopher under the separation agreement.51
The controversy with Virginia continued during October and November
1940, and although Welles did eventually pay the preschool entry fee (against
the counsel of Weissberger), he rejected Virginias request for the monthly
stipend after his draft number was drawn 5,283rd, making it unlikely that
he would be called early or, in fact, at all. Weissberger remarked on the
contrast between Welless luck and that of Jimmy Stewart. 52 Welless luck,
however, was Virginia and Christophers loss, and Weissberger deducted an
extra hundred dollars from their rent support to pay for shipping household
items to Welles, commenting to Welles that this would be a sort of invisible
reimbursement of your payment to Christopher.53
Welless luck did not translate into skill at managing his income, and by
mid-November he was in dire nancial straits, unable to aord a thousand

CLASSICS FOR THE MASSES

dollar donation to the Hollywood Community Chest (a donation he seemed

unwilling to make regardless). 54 His nancial pressures were acute after his
autumn lecture tour. The tour depleted his funds and distracted him at a
time when he needed to cultivate connections and relationships in his new
profession as a Hollywood lm director-writer-star. Welless assistant Richard Baer conded to Weissberger that the tour was an impractical failure
that paid only forty-ve hundred dollars, and
took him away from something a good deal more important and even
more productive from both an artistic and an income point of view.
While we had rst thought that the ten day intermission after the close
of the picture [Citizen Kane] was not particularly serious, I cannot still
feel that this is true.55
Desperate for cash after spending his last funds on a party for himself at the
close of the lecture tour, Welles realized he had to start working immediately
on a new idea for an RKO project, while simultaneously worrying about
building up his cash reserves.
In this crisis, Welles returned to a familiar patternhe looked toward the
Mercury, Houseman, and possible adaptations of earlier projects for RKO.
Welles wired Houseman on November 28, Hope to come east for a Christmas week or so and see much of you. How about a job on your Campbell
Playhouse? Every means of income, as you possibly know, has been cut o
and I have no prospects whatever.56 Weissberger was also growing increasingly nervous about Welless nances and asked Richard Baer to Please let
me know what the plans are, if any, with respect to the second picture [in the
RKO contract]. Is Orson likely to commence it before the rst of the year?
We cannot possibly approach RKO for reallocation of the contract payments
until the second picture is under way.57 Weissberger was even more emphatic
by December 26, 1940, reminding Welles that
we are in default for not having completed the picture [Citizen Kane]
by October 1st, and for not having commenced the second picture by
December 1st. If for any reason RKO should wish to take advantage of
any breach on our part, it could readily use this[. . . .] I would propose
we specify completion the rst picture by February 1st 1941 [. . .] the
second picture by April 1st 1941 [. . .] the third within 90 days after
completion of the second.58
Welles needed a story idea fast, and if past patterns were a predictor, he would
return to adapt one of his radio classics, an approach that would allow him
to recycle a partial script and actors.

CLASSICS FOR THE MASSES

Welles and Houseman had brought up the idea for an adaptation of Pickwick Papers to radio executives representing Campbell Soup in New York at a
September 29, 1939, meeting in which they assigned grades to possible story
adaptation ideas. This preliminary meeting focused on adapting what they
regarded as classics, whether from present or past authors. They considered
scripts ranging from The Great Gatsby to Trilby, and would later be involved
with many lm productions of these texts. For example, Welless successful
1938 radio performance as Rochester was reprised in the 1944 Jane Eyre, an
idea discussed at this meeting. Welles used two radio shows as sketches for
The Magnicent Ambersons, one by the same title from October 29, 1939,
and the earlier radio play Seventeen from October 16, 1938. Welles reportedly played the recording of the Mercury radio version of The Magnicent
Ambersons to convince RKO president George Schaefer to produce it. 59
At the September 1939 meeting, Houseman and Welles both gave an A
to Pickwick as a story idea, and the main resistance seems to have been from
two executives who had not read the novel but promised to listen to the
recording of the October 1938 Mercury radio production, featuring Welles
as Sergeant Buzzfuzz. The idea of adapting Pickwick Papers into a new medium remained interesting enough for Welles to suggest to reporters for the
Saturday Evening Post six months later that he had wanted to make Pickwick with W. C. Fields, but that great actor was under contract elsewhere.60
Certainly The Pickwick Papers would have been a natural choice for Welles
at this juncture. It oered an already completed scenario, coupled with the
appeal of a major star already associated with Dickens through his success
as Micawber in MGMs David Coppereld.
Why then didnt Welles use it? The answers are complex and several.
The changes in Welless life and his relationship with RKO over the next
year suspended the era of classic adaptation for Welles and took his career
in a new direction following his rst released RKO lm, Citizen Kane. Add
the well-analyzed Kane controversy to the other disasters for Welles in the
years between 1939 and 1941,61 and it becomes apparent that Welles was no
longer interested in translating the classics for the masses, despite RKOs
hesitance to abandon a formula for economic success that they felt would
result in larger prots.
RKO had hired Welles, in the words of Naremore, as a jack-of-all-trades
who would produce a picture a year, and though he seemed to have half the
classic literature of the Western world on his list of proposed lms, his stay
at RKO was littered with rejected or abandoned scripts.62 As late as 1940
both Welles and the media still thought his rst RKO picture would be the
adaptation of Heart of Darkness, although he was aware of getting a bit of

CLASSICS FOR THE MASSES

pushing around and stalling on the budget.63 Between 1940 and 1941, there
is an interesting pattern in the ideas that he picked up and then rejected.
During this period he shifted away from his concept of routinely adapting
the classics for the masses, although he did retain interest in adaptation. For
example, he tried to get the title registration for Jane Eyre away from David
O. Selznick in December 1940, two years after he played Rochester on radio
and three years before he would play the role under Robert Stevensons direction.64 But he was also developing a greater interest in contemporary authors
and unusual, experimental projects that foregrounded his other narrative
interests: interrogations of subjectivity, primitivism, and the line between
truth and ction. In fact, until his 1948 Macbeth, Welles would not really
bring a classic piece of literature to lm as a director.
Instead, Welless creative interest shifted to current topics of politics and
identity, always themes of his adaptations. Specically, he literally moved
south of the border. This new focus on Latin America may have been stirred,
in part at least, by his relationship with the Mexican actress Dolores Del
Rio. As little as a month after the 1939 New York meeting in which he and
Houseman had discussed adapting Pickwick, he was spotted carrying the
book Conquest of Mexico into a New York City lm meeting, though he
deected the question of it as a possible lm project.65 Even as his romance
with Del Rio waxed and waned66 his interest in Latin America increased,
and over the next two years, Welles would propose several Latin American
story ideas to RKO: The Way to Santiago (a.k.a. Mexican Melodrama),67 a
lm that mingles the exploration of the rst-person-singular perspective with
that of national identity; Its All True, the unnished Brazilian documentary
discussed in depth in chapter 4; and Unnamed Mexican Story, a variation on
agitprop focusing on class liberation of Mexico. In all these projects, Welles
continued to explore the rst-person-singular perspective that began with
his radio series. But these story ideas also indicated a fundamental shift in
Welless thinking from his Campbell Playhouse era, during which he had
focused on promoting himself as a reinventor of the classics.
By 1941, aggravated by increasing tension with RKO, Welles was ready to
risk dissatisfying the studio by embarking on projects that deviated from
the classics because original works would reinforce his image as star director and let his work appear undiluted by associations with other creators.
In short, Welles was ready to risk originality, particularly after the volatile
writing dispute with Herman Mankiewicz over coauthorship of Citizen Kane.
Following the release of Citizen Kane, he would continue his exploration of
the rst-person-singular viewpoint without the same level of dependence on
adapting classics. Isolated by the studio and the public, he came to believe

CLASSICS FOR THE MASSES

that his best hope for success and artistic freedom came through accepting
a certain amount of isolation and independence. His idea for The Pickwick
Papers became outdated in that it would not feature him in the central role
and would limit his new desire to be regarded as a creator of original screenplays rather than a master of adaptation.
Welles never adapted Dickens onto lm despite the fact that he considered
such a project both publicly and privately, and worked with Dickens more
than any other author in the year preceding his Hollywood move. Nevertheless, Welles often drew on his large pool of radio adaptations as sketches for
lm projects, and he continued to cross-market his entertainment brand
throughout his career. It would have been hard to make a new version of A
Tale of Two Cities so closely following Ronald Colmans Academy Award
nominated version. On the other hand, it must have been hard for RKO
to resist capitalizing on the other Dickens success in 1935, George Cukors
David Coppereld, starring W. C. Fields, and it does appear that the studio
briey considered a partnership between Welles and Fields for a version of
The Pickwick Papers. Ultimately, Welless Pickwick Papers did not get made
for a variety of reasons, the least interesting of which is contract diculty
with Fields. Since Fields had been on loan from Paramount to MGM for
David Coppereld, it seems unlikely that RKO could not have worked out
this obstacle. The real impediment to this project stems from Welless own
developing Hollywood persona. Citizen Kane proved an educational experience for Welles, both disillusioning and redemptive. He emerged from the
tumultuous years 193841 with a clearer perception of his own ambitions
and aesthetic interest in the rst-person singular as a means of modernist
expression of alienation, as well as an increasing desire to explore psychological primitivism and the blurry line between reality and ction.
Welles does leave us traces of his imagined versions of Dickens on lm.
The radio plays of 1938 are vivid entertainment spectacles in their own right,
and certainly Welles strove throughout his career for intertextuality, integrating lm clips into stage performances such as Too Much Johnson and
Five Kings, and capturing his radio nesse with dialogue and sound experimentation in later lms. His experiments with lighting, sound eects, and
staging inuenced each of the three main performance mediums in which
he workedtheater, radio, and lmas well as his new favorite medium for
performance of himself as a brand name, television.
By August 1940, Welles had mailed letters to leaders of religious congregations to gather reactions to his proposed Life of Christ project, leaving
behind The Pickwick Papers. Juxtaposing the prospect of playing Christ with
that of backing Fieldss performance in Pickwick, it seems safe to say that

CLASSICS FOR THE MASSES

Welles chose the rst-person singular over classic adaptation, an interest

that is prophesied in an early typed journal entry probably written around
his twentieth birthday: we are all of us merchants of our biography, buying
the future with our past.68 Indeed, Welles bought his way into Hollywood
with his adaptations of Dickens classics like A Tale of Two Cities, The Pickwick Papers, and A Christmas Carol. He bought his way back out again,
however, with his commitment to creating himself as a brand name based
on controversy and innovation, and this long-term investment in his image
would cost him short-term box-oce returns.

2WP_cTa"
Exploiters in Surroundings Not Healthy for a
White Man: Primitivism and the Identity Detour
The story is of a man and a girl in love[. . . .] There is an unhappy
ending which we wont need to mention, man dies and the girl
goes away unfullled. There are cannibals, shootings, petty
bickering among the bureaucrats, native dances, a fascinating
girl, gorgeous, but black, a real Negro type. She has an inferred,
but not denitely stated, jungle love-life with our hero.
Heart of Darkness plot treatment

This passage, from the plot treatment for Orson Welless rst Hollywood lm,
Heart of Darkness, captures the 1930s fascination with the primitive, often
seen in classic Hollywood cinema. But the passage also acknowledges the
psychological complexity of white colonial desire for the primitive when it
promises that in this lm, everyone and everything is just a bit o normal,
just a little obliqueall this being the result of the strange nature of [the
ivory industrys] workthat is, operating as exploiters in surroundings not
healthy for a white man.1 Guerric DeBona uses this very paragraph to argue
for Welless Heart of Darkness as a critique of fascism, a push for racially
progressive politics, evidence of Welless genius in adapting and complicating
Conrads modernist prose.2 While DeBonas assessment accurately captures
Welless political goals, his view of primitivism was heavily rooted in the belief
that the white male psyche would be rejuvenated through intimate contact
with the primitive. Welles himself participated in this paradigm, often seeking creative rejuvenation through exchanges with the primitive, as did other
modernist authors and artists. His genius, however, was that of the griot, a
cultural storyteller able to assimilate the longings and fears of a group and
convey them through a compelling narrative. Welless primitivist dramas in

SURROUNDINGS NOT HEALTHY FOR A WHITE MAN

the 1930s and 40s spoke for an anxious white collective, often exploring the
shifting paradigms of white colonial desire and conquest.
Welless stage, radio, and lm narratives between 1938 and 1942 are key
to understanding mid-twentieth-century American constructions of whiteness, because the increasingly popular acoustic performance of race on the
radio used audience imagination dierently than did the visual spectacle
of blackness invoked on stage or in lm. Welles is a unique artist in that he
worked freely in all three media, oering unprecedented insight into the
intersection of these performance forms. Radio oered freedom beyond that
of visual media to interpret white fantasies of race, since radio performance
enticed imagination through sound rather than spectacle. There were two
main modes of invoking race in the disembodied sound of radio: realism
and expressionism. Radio shows like Amos n Andy invoked realism through
mundane plots and dialect, even as they relied on the fantasies of white actors
and audiences to generate audio blackface.3 Welles, in contrast, evoked the
mood of the primitive via suggestions of the supernatural and exotic. For
Welles, race was the stu of magic, not of everyday comedy.
Orson Welles molded his identity as a genius much as any showman or
magician would: by taking raw material and transforming it unexpectedly
before his audiences eyes and ears. He created his boy-wonder reputation by
playing against the grain of the American publics expectations, manipulating its various fascinations with social collectivism, primitivism, and high
art. His approach was predicated on and overtly interested in raceas an
expression of the mysteries of identity and sexual power, but also as a political topic. Welless white imagination incorporated and explored primitivist
images, marking the intersection between modernist fascination with the
primitive unconscious and popular fascination with the exotic.
Populist Modernism and the Primitive
Welless radio work in the late 1930s and early 1940s reflects the growing cultural preoccupation with dening civilizationand the civilized
mindthrough its relation to the primitive. Welless vision of the primitive,
like that of many modernists of the 1920s, contains great ambivalence: while
it maintains associations with alluring self-destruction, it is often the white
male protagonist who cannibalizes or internalizes the primitive, rather
than vice versa. Rather than functioning as a purely external signier, the
primitive reects a needed and desired aspect of white (male) American
self-denition. T. S. Eliot summarizes the explicitly aural associations of the
primitive in his 1917 The Use of Poetry and of Criticism, in which he links
auditory imagination to

SURROUNDINGS NOT HEALTHY FOR A WHITE MAN

feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below conscious levels
of thought and feeling, invigorating every word: sinking the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin, and bringing something
back, seeking the beginning and the end. It [. . .] fuses the old and
obliterated, and the trite, the current, and the new and the surprising,
the most ancient and the most civilized mentality.4
Often, Welless mass entertainment strategies follow the dramatic arc
suggested by Eliot, taking a male protagonist into the depths of the primitive
in order to bring him back to his origins and emerge newly civilized.
Additionally, the clash between civilized and primitive is gendered as a
male quest often acted out upon or through a female body, which represents
either a white ideal of civilization or the dark allure of woman-as-terrain.
Through the conquest of one or both of these women, the male protagonist
is either made whole or destroyed, depending on his power as a patriarch
and colonial adventurer. Thus the primitive comes to represent a type of
emotional anarchy, a darkness within the white male protagonist that must
be conquered.
The most elaborate example of this pattern is Welless rst RKO project,
the unnished lm Heart of Darkness, based on a 1938 radio adaptation;
but his protagonists undertake similar psychological quests in the 1939
radio drama Algiers, his 1936 staging of a Voodoo Macbeth, and his 1938
performance in The White God, an episode of The Shadow. In all these
productions, the primitive appears in accordance with the model outlined
in Freuds Totem and Tabooas a necessary stage of development through
which whiteness passes.5
Welless level of involvement with these productions varied. In the case
of The Shadow he served only as an actor, while he adapted, directed, and
starred in Heart of Darkness. Certainly the level of complexity delivered
in the Welles-authored narratives diers from those with which he was
involved only as an actor, and (as DeBona suggests) the Welles narratives
often contain an element of self-critique and skepticism about the mechanisms of entertainment that produce them.6 Nevertheless, Welless interest
in primitivism positioned him at the intersection between the popular and
the elite, the location of what Werner Sollors terms populist modernism, a
collectivist impulse that paradoxically integrates modernist fascination with
high art and Western elitism.7 Kobena Mercer calls populist modernism a
kind of surreptitious return of the binaristic oppositions associated with an
essentialist concept of ethnicity arising in the very discourse that contests
and critiques it.8 Welles aesthetically rearticulates white fascination with
the primitive even as he increasingly critiques it politically in the 1940s. A

SURROUNDINGS NOT HEALTHY FOR A WHITE MAN

major dierence between Welles and many of his contemporaries, however,

is that his interest in primitivism coincided with a conscious eort to hire
actors and actresses of color to perform his scripts. Thus his politics and
art conjoined.
Colonizing Genius: Manhood and Nationhood
in Welless Voodoo Macbeth
Welless Macbeth challenged conventional dramatic practice in several ways.
It was radical in its casting choices, in its willingness to freely adapt Shakespeare to appeal to mass audiences, and in its focus on integrating music
and visual experimentation. To a degree, Welles was simply channeling
racial associations with primitivism from his surrounding culturefrom
his wife, Virginia,9 the New York literati, and Eugene ONeill, among others. Nevertheless, blackness and Harlem played pivotal roles in securing
the public concept of Welles as master magician: master of internal and
external darkness, magician testing the boundaries of conventional rules
of marriage, race relations, and artistic production.
Welless willingness to adapt Shakespeare into a modern context raised
the question of whether to adapt the text to African American dialect, which
risked creating a Tambo and Bones Macbeth. Ultimately, Welles chose not
to adapt Shakespeares iambic pentameter, but reviewers like John Mason
Brown lamented his decision not to adapt Shakespeares verse into dialect
to make the language match the locale.10 Welless explanation for why he
chose this approach reveals the racism embedded within Welless otherwise
progressive political ideology. Reminiscing about the production in February
1942, Welles recalled,
The negro with his virgin mind, pure without any special intellectual
intoxication, understands the essence of the Greek theater better,
which demands simplicity and the absence of articial interpretations.
I staged Macbeth by Shakespeare in Harlem, New York, by a cast of
Negros [sic] and never had I the trouble to read or to correct speech and
intonations. They discovered all themselves, with a prodigious intuition
that they have in a high degree for the tragic theater. And this in the
face of their never having read or heard speak about Shakespeare!11
Welless performance ideology emerged from the conjunction of several aesthetic movements and his 1936 Voodoo Macbeth reected multiple anxieties inspired by legacies of turn-of-the-century racism in performance.
Blackness and the exotic owed in two currents in the early twentieth
century. The rst, inherited from nineteenth-century sentimentalism, George

SURROUNDINGS NOT HEALTHY FOR A WHITE MAN

Frederickson labels romantic racialism in his work The Black Image in

the White Mind. Romantic racialism oered stereotypical images of the
suering mulatta, the exotic black buck, and the endearing Uncle Tom.
Its aectionate condescension laid the groundwork for twentieth-century
images of primitivism, particularly via modernist uses of race as metaphor
and symbol. George Crandall elaborates on the twentieth-century tendency
to fall back into the patterns of romantic racialists who used blackness to
represent what seemed tragically lacking in white American civilization.12
Expressionism used romantic racial symbolism to evoke the internal emotions moved on to the external skinthus the tragedy of race in dramas like
ONeills The Emperor Jones (1920), in which the beating tom-toms and the
jungle are tangible performance metaphors for Brutus Joness own interior
struggle of conscience and guilt.
Welless early dramatic use of primitivism emerged from the conjunction
of romantic racialism, expressionism, and populist politics. It added to the
metaphors of the rst two movements a concern with the social construction and political outcomes of racial identity. Nevertheless, his primitivism
retained the romantic associations of blackness with dark passions and the
supernatural or, as Marianna Torgovnick terms them, our id forces.13 For
decades, blackness as a symbol of lost passion and of simplicity had made
primitivism seem romantic and nostalgic to white audiences.14 But, as Torgovnick notes, 1930s primitivism was criticized by fascists as a symptom of
debased, promiscuous folk culture.15 On the other end of the political spectrum, collectivists used primitive images to represent the vitality within unfettered sexual communion and the achievement of self-discovery and freedom through impulses that rejected fascist elitism.16 This second paradigm
t not only the political and aesthetic needs of the Federal Theatre Projects
Negro Theatre Unit but also the personal fantasies of Welles. It invoked the
paradigms of romantic racialism, but with positive connotations.
The creation of the Negro Theatre Unit was controversial, and advance
word of Welless Voodoo Macbeth did nothing to reassure those who
thought such a theater would do no more than provide a place for black
actors to play out white fantasies of blackness. The appointment of John
Houseman to lead the unit made it vulnerable to charges of racism from its
inception. Houseman tried to alleviate the controversy by dividing the work
of the Negro Theatre Unit into two categories: work by, for, and with black
actors and classical work performed by black actors but staged and designed
by white artists.17 In the second category, Welless Macbeth mingled Haitian
politics and voodoo imagery with Shakespeare,18 unambiguously eliciting
white fantasies of race but also oering credible jobs to black actors. The

SURROUNDINGS NOT HEALTHY FOR A WHITE MAN

Black Communist Party picketed Welless rehearsals because of their fear

that Shakespeares tragedy would be transformed into a minstrel burlesque.19
There was ample precedent for this anxiety, since popular skits like Bones
Plays OFellar and Dars-de-money had been minstrel staples a generation
earlier,20 and radio shows like Amos n Andy conrmed the enduring popularity of such minstrel images.21 The question was whether black actors would
be allowed to play characters with emotional depth, with the tragic dignity
of the Macbeths rather than the supercial comedy of Tambo and Bones.
Justiably concerned, audiences did not expect the convergence of 1920s
expressionism with 1930s social agitation. In his Voodoo Macbeth Welles
depicts blackness in classic modernist primitive terms: it is powerful, compelling, supernatural.22 But it also contains a layer of psychological complexity not
usually associated with primitivism. As James Naremore suggests, the tension
between good and evil within a protagonist had long been a preoccupation of
Welless: he had explored the theme of liberal humanism versus the demons
of psychoanalysis and the supernatural as early as his play Bright Lucifer in
1933.23 Welles invokes the psychology of the supernatural in both Bright Lucifer
and Macbeth by prominent use of an expressionist drumbeat.
Drumming Up Interest: Hecate and the Witches Take Center Stage
Like Eugene ONeill, Welles used the expressionist drumbeat to reect supernatural forces at work on the mind of his protagonist. The audio cue of
the primitive drum captured the gurative pulse of the primitive within
Macbeth and represented both an authentic Haitian feel and a white fantasy
of the darkness of voodoo. He enlarged the cast to have a number of actors
play voodoo women, witches, and voodoo men, as well as casting the classically trained Eric Burroughs24 as Hecate, who played opposite an authentic
voodoo drummer, Abdul. Welles literally placed the drummers, and thus the
witches and Hecate, center stage:
Before the curtain rises, drums and voodoo chanting in the darkness
and the scene becomes gradually visible [. . .] Voodoo ceremony in
progress. Half-circle of white-clad women celebrantsin the center,
somewhat raised from the stage level, the three witches. To the left, the
dark gure of Hecate. Distant low thunder and lightning.25
Hecate is given lines from both the witches and Macbeth himself, and even
participates in Banquos murder, making him a central character. Hecate
presides over all the events as a master magician, making Macbeths fate the
product of dark magic, and the script describes Hecate and the three witches
as birds of prey stalking Macbeth as their victim (1.2). Welles divides the

SURROUNDINGS NOT HEALTHY FOR A WHITE MAN

texts into two acts in the draft script (three acts in the performance version),
with each act framed by Hecates curses. At the end of the rst act, Hecate
promises supernatural tortures for Macbeth will follow:
I will drain him dry as hay;
Sleep shall neither night nor day
hang upon his pent house lid:
(Drums stop)
He shall live a man forbid!
(A thump of a drum on the last syllable of forbid)
(1.2)
Hecate often closes scenes, immersing the crowd in darkness and silence.
He closes the rst and last scenes by crying, Peace, at which the drums,
army, music, voodoo voices, all are instantly silent (2.6). Then he initiates his
spell, rst on Macbeth, later on Malcolm, by crying, The charms wound
up! (1.1, 2.6; a line Welles chose to use to close his 1948 lm adaptation
of Macbeth as well). Like a ringmaster, Hecate controls the tempo of the
production through chants and drums. In this way, the Voodoo Macbeth
was as much an audio event as a spectacle, marking scene shifts and mood
changes with aural as well as visual cues. It also channeled white fantasies
of the exotic through the lter of claims of authenticity. The promise of an
authentic Haitian voodoo experience26 lies at the center of several critical
reactions to the show and resonates in the memories of those involved with
the production. The drumbeat simultaneously conjured modernist expressionism and quotidian Haitian existence, both the exotic and the ordinary.
Acting Out White Fantasies: Harlem Actors and a White Auteur
The drumbeat in particular recalled another white American dramatic genius. Simon Callow remarks, The inuence of The Emperor Jones was felt by
many spectators, especially perhaps in [its] insistent use of drums. Welles,
like many an artist[, . . .] stole anything that was germane to his purpose. He
was not, in fact, a great innovator at all; he was a great fulller.27 However,
Welless use of the drums to make transitions between scenes, to bridge
events, and to control the audiences perception of the play itself extended
beyond ONeills more decorative use of them, in no small part because of
the creativity of the drummers themselves. Richard France calls Welless
drums transitional markers that created the equivalent of a lm dissolve. 28
Houseman praised the drummers for creating a supernatural atmosphere
[that] added to the excitement that was beginning to form around our production of Macbeth.29

SURROUNDINGS NOT HEALTHY FOR A WHITE MAN

While the vision of Haiti Welles presented was more fantasy than fact,
the drummers gave the performance a dimension of authenticity. But their
artistry was continually ciphered through layers of white fantasy, and absent
a recording of the performance,30 the drummers exist in critical discourse
mainly as embodiments of these fantasies of the Haitian primitive.31 Arthur
Knight articulates the centrality of the drums to the production by saying,
No one who ever saw his Macbeth will forget the rhythmic pounding of
jungle drums as an underscore to the mounting tragedy.32 Indeed, reviewers
at the April 14, 1936, opening were fascinated by the drummers. Failing to
appreciate the psychological complexity of Welless conception, they tended
to see the show as a musical. Solidifying the fears of the Black Communist
Party, as Callow points out, the word amusing keeps popping up in their
reviewsa word not usually applied to Shakespeares Macbeth.33 The witches
were a fascinating and disquieting point for reviewers, described by John
Mason Brown of the New York Post as mumbo-jumbo agents of a fearful
witch doctor; Macbeth himself was a sort of Brutus Jones Macbeth.34
In the gure of the drummers, the Voodoo Macbeth fused the supernatural and metaphoric associations of black skin and primitive drumbeat
with the aura of Shakespeares genius. In this case, the Bard himself plays
the role of T. S. Eliots white protagonist, taken into the darkness of Haitian
voodoo with his Macbeths and emerging the stronger (or at least the more
popular) for it. Of course, Welles accompanied Shakespeare on this journey,
and there is far more Welles than Shakespeare in the script. Using the tool
of adaptation, Welles was able to mediate between the publics fascination
with voodoo and its respect for literary masterworks to forge a work of
populist modernism.
The major dierence between Welles and earlier modernist dramatists
who used primitivism is that his interest in the primitive coincided with a
conscious eort to hire actors and actresses of color to perform his scripts,
and the 1936 Macbeth was perhaps his most successful endeavor in this
regard. The WPA Voodoo Macbeth featured a black cast at a time when
a working actor of any race was a rarity. It provided steady work and good
publicity for 125 players, a broad mix of respected actors and newcomers.
Even the child actors got good press coverage. 35 Its collective production
impulse contrasts with that of ONeills earlier Emperor Jones, which highlighted a single black actor and relegated other black actors to minor roles.
Despite the communal impulse of the script, however, Welles-as-director
often acted the role of colonial governor giving paternal guidance to his cast,
a point that created resentment among some cast members. Selling himself
as a genius-of-the-people, the youthful Welles acted out primitivist fantasies

SURROUNDINGS NOT HEALTHY FOR A WHITE MAN

through his Haitian Macbeth, particularly through his relationships with

black actors.
The Wellesian tales surrounding this production are many, and it is hard
to separate ction from fact, even in interviews with Welles. However, the
tales themselves are evidence of the connotations of primitivism surrounding
the production. Welless erotic obsession with the primitive extended to Jack
Carter, whom he described as beautiful[, . . .] a black Barrymore. Welles
seems to have bought into a cultural skin fetish that linked black skin to
dark passions. To enhance the racial dimension of Voodoo Macbeth, Jack
Carter and Edna Thomas reportedly darkened their skin with makeup for
their roles as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, although publicity photos and
footage indicate that theirs was not the heavy blackface of Oliviers Othello
(see Figure 3). In the folklore surrounding the performance, the essence of
Carters darkness was his bad-boy reputation. He was associated with a murder charge and the mob in HarlemHouseman describes him as a pimp, a
killer, and nally an actor. In an interview with Barbara Leaming, Welles
described his relationship with Carter in erotic terms: I seduce actors, make
them fall in love with me says Orsonand so it was with Jack Carter. Welles
accompanied Carter on drinking forays into nighttime Harlem, engaging in a
type of racial tourism common at the time among white liberal intellectuals.36
Welles was translating T. S. Eliots paradigm for the protagonists cathartic
use of the primitive from theory to practice. Through his relationship with
Carter, Welles felt rejuvenated creatively.
Houseman endorsed the curious intimacy between Welles and Carter,
admitting that it proved of inestimable value to the project. In an interview
nearly fty years after the fact, Welles remembers nearly being arrested at a
Harlem rent party with Carter, and returning home to call Houseman and
embellish the adventure: I intended to torture him [Houseman] . . . but when
I realized it was giving him a little pleasure, I dropped it. 37 Whether or not
Welless anecdote is strictly factual, it reveals a fantasy that casts the two men
with whom he associated most as superego/id, with Houseman representing white intellectual restraint and Carter black erotic desire. Welles often
exaggerated his escapades with Carter to aggravate Houseman, with whom
he had begun an unusually ambivalent artistic friendship.38
Welless own longing for Carters role as Macbeth was manifest when
Maurice Ellis, the lead in the touring version, fell ill in Indianapolis and
Welles himself took the stage in blackface. 39 Reminiscing about that performance, Welles said, I was a much darker Macbeth than Jack was. I had
to prove I belonged.40 He also claimed that the audience did not recognize
him in blackface, since at the time he was primarily known as a radio actor.41

SURROUNDINGS NOT HEALTHY FOR A WHITE MAN

Welless understanding of blackness was that it could render him part of the
anonymous throng even when he was playing the leading role in Macbeth and
despite the fact that, even following his own logic, his famous voice should
have revealed him readily to most audiences. Part of his love of disguise,
blackface allowed him to escape his role as white intellectual and enter into
the realm of undierentiated masculinity (at least in fantasy), as had his racial and sexual touring of Harlem with Jack Carter. Welless desire to prove
I belonged to both Freuds primitive and civilized worlds, to straddle the
domains of ego and id, would become a classic mark of his later work, and it
reects a cultural preoccupation with the realization of white genius via the
conquest of the darker primitive. He highlighted an Oedipal interpretation
of the Macbeths, saying, Lady Macbeth ought to be the mother in the family to a weak-willed husband, and Edna Thomas was the mother.42 Thomas,
an open lesbian, did not really conform to the traditional Oedipal maternal
role Welles assigned her, but Welles often conceived womens roles in two
genres: Oedipal temptress or available ingnue.43
As for the most prominent reviewer of the day, Brooks Atkinson, Callow
remarks that his review in the Times revealed his (more or less) innocent
racism.44 To a contemporary reader, this variety of racism seems far from
innocent, and the review also reveals the convergence of the homoerotic
and the colonial in Atkinsons perspective. Atkinson praises the sensuous,
black-blooded vitality of the witches and drools over Jack Carter as a ne
gure of a negro in tight-tting trousers that do justice to his anatomy.45
One cannot help but suspect the tom-toms were playing a bit too loudly for
Atkinson, whose review reveals more about his own desires than about the
performance. The critical fascination with the drummers continued as the
show toured the country. Robert G. Tucker praised the production, saying,
It has the aspect of savagery and voodooism and the manner in which the
uncanny atmosphere is created and carried on is the most impressive feature of a splendid production.46 Even recent critics focus on the mediating
power of the drummers. France sees them as an aural counterpoint to the
visual spectacle: The primitive violence of the drums [. . .] added dimension
to the images of civilized violence onstage.47 The military clashes of ambitious men, even the slaughter of a child, seem to be positioned culturally
as violent by-products of civilization, when in fact these acts erode the
very binary of civilized/primitive. The presence of the drums troubles this
binary, questions the categories themselvesby juxtaposing Bard and Abdul, Welles and Hecate, author and performer. Mainstream critics from the
1930s to the present seem satised that Shakespeare lost mastery of his text
during the Voodoo Macbeth, that the performed adaptation utilizes the

SURROUNDINGS NOT HEALTHY FOR A WHITE MAN

text without reproducing it. Instead it creates a new text, one that satises
and challenges audiences through its ambivalence, and specically through
its use of modernist primitivism.
Voodoo Macbeth was an early experiment with Wellesian primitivism,
a motif that reappeared throughout his career. Welles often associated the
primitive with the ability to disappear into anonymity and to play erotically
beyond the bounds of social convention.48 Nowhere is this cultural preoccupation with the primitive as a vehicle for white genius more clearly manifest
than in three of his early radio performances: The White God episode of
The Shadow and his Campbell Playhouse productions of Heart of Darkness
and Algiers.
A White God in the Shadows
Between 1938 and 1939, Welles starred in two radio performances that
explicitly took the listener on T. S. Eliots rhythmic journey into the primitive for the sake of rejuvenating the civilized mentality. The White God
episode of The Shadow aired July 10, 1938, and Algiers aired as part of the
Mercury Theatre series on October 8, 1939. The Shadow series was deeply
rooted in Freudian concepts of the dark unconscious, opening each week
with the brooding reminder: Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of
men? [resonant maniacal cackling] The Shadow knows. Welless presence
was more widely received in The Shadow episodes, even if listeners did not
know it was Welles, than in any other medium. His voice held a power over
listeners that drew them into the fantastic adventures of Lamont Cranston,
the invisible Shadow, and his sidekick, Margo Lane (Agnes Moorehead). The
part was an ideal t for Welles in that Cranston was debonair and yet had a
darker sidehe was both civilized and primitive. In addition, The Shadow
matched up with Welless ambition to be a magician, since the Shadow was
an invisible protagonist who often used telepathy to trick his adversaries.
The very invisibility of the protagonist suited the medium of radio, for what
easier protagonist to imagine than one who is invisible? The broadcasts
manipulated the listeners imagination with the same aural cues that Margo
and other participants in the drama were given to understand where the
invisible Shadow was and what he was doing, such as a slamming door or a
sliding lock to mark an entrance or exit.
In The White God, the Shadow is called to the South Pacic to gure out
why fteen ocean vessels have disappeared in an area known as the Graveyard of the Pacic. The Shadow quickly ascertains that a man referred to by
natives as the White God has turned a volcano on the island into a giant
magnet that pulls in ships and seaplanes. In a twist that endears this episode

SURROUNDINGS NOT HEALTHY FOR A WHITE MAN

to any academic listener, the White God is actually the disgruntled university
scientist Lloyd Carlin, who had assisted another scientist, Rudolph Hoyt, in
his development of magnetic technology. Fired from the university, Carlin
has now stolen the technology and used it to convince the natives that hes
a white god. They are not the only ones who are convinced. As the natives
are throwing his old mentor, Hoyt, into the volcano as a human sacrice,
Carlin taunts him, saying, Since being dismissed from the university, I have
become a God, a White God! This episode, lasting only thirty minutes,
lacks the complexity of writing and stylistic execution of Welless Mercury
Theatre productions, but it oers a glimpse into the popular concept of
primitivism in the entertainment industry and suggests Welless ability to
take techniques and images from popular performances and recombine them
into the multilayered, more ambivalent psychological narratives associated
with modernism in his Mercury productions.
For example, the use of sound eects in this episode shows how closely
aural stimulus ties to modern concepts of identity, even in a simple half-hour
radio drama. By singling out tricks and slippages of aural imagination, even
this episode of The Shadow interrogates linear notions of white subjectivity.
First, the Shadow himself is a disembodied voice, androgynous in that he
needs Margo Lane or another sidekick to embody his actions. In this episode,
he controls the natives by throwing his voice to make it appear that Hoyts
daughter (whofantastically!survived a fall into the volcano and climbed
back out) has a mans voice. As the Shadow exclaims, A masculine voice
coming from a reincarnated woman should prove quite a shock!
The Shadow uses Miss Hoyts body to enact his own desires. It serves as a
proxy for male power as he competes with the White God for his subjects, the
primitive island people. To counter the permeability and weakness usually
associated with the female body, the Shadow asks Miss Hoyt to wear a concealed bullet-proof vest. As a result, she doesnt fall when Carlin shoots her,
thus making the natives believe that she, too, is a god. Through Miss Hoyt,
he instructs the terried natives to bring the White God to her. When she
worries that the natives wont understand the Shadows standard English, he
reassures her that hes really speaking to Carlin in a man-to-man contest of
authority, dueled out via the body of a woman. The Shadow declares, The girl
is your new and only god! In response, the listener hears frightened native
cries and yells, accompanied by the omnipresent native drum.
The male power contest itself uses conicted metaphors of the primitive/
civilized binary, showing it is not really binary at all but a plural and shifting
power matrix. In this case, the Shadow (darkness) is seeking to unseat the
White God (the ultimate white patronymic) and usurp his control of the

SURROUNDINGS NOT HEALTHY FOR A WHITE MAN

primitive. But the civilized arrives in the form of a dark shadow masked by
the body of a white womana twist on the usual metaphor of the primitive
itself as a dark mask. The battle between the Shadow and the White God
becomes entirely about interpretation. He who manipulates expectation and
understanding wields power, and women, natives, and nature are all mere
pawns in this contest of meaning. By manipulating the aural imagination
of the natives through his voice, the Shadow imbues himself with the traditional phallic powers of idealized whiteness: he masters Miss Hoyts literally
impenetrable body, and he controls meaning and subjectivity for the natives
through the manipulations of her body and his voice. On another level, Welles
manipulates the aural imaginations of the mass audience of the radio show
itself, creating an illusion of threatening natives in the South Pacic from
a New York radio studio but also revealing the fraudulence of his devices.
Since the listener is in on the trick of Miss Hoyts vest, we have to wonder
what other tricks have been employed to deceive us as listeners. The only
dierence in the positions of the primitive audience and the modern radio
listener is modern awareness of the instability of audio perception, in other
words, a self-critical ear and wariness of technology.49
For his nal trick, the Shadow must dupe more than a mere audience of
natives. He must trick his white male counterpart, Carlin. The Shadow fools
Carlin into ascending the volcano by pretending he is walking beside him.
In a maniacal, nihilistic moment, thinking he is face to face with the disembodied Shadow, Carlin activates his giant magnet while he and the natives
are at the lip of the volcano, leading to their collective destruction. Carlin
mistakenly employs his phallic power (the magnet) because he is tricked by
the Shadows own phallic power (the voice). Our last aural images of Carlin
and the natives are the sounds of their screams as they fall into the volcano,
indistinguishable from each other. Carlin has become one with his primitive
audience and lost his status as both white man and god. The radio audience,
in contrast, retains its position as witness to modern entertainment, a position that depends on the knowledge that this parable of transgression and
containment is ephemeral, a trick of technology.
The Shadows intellectual contest with the White God for control of the
primitive is probably not what T. S. Eliot had in mind in his discussion of
primitivism and modernism, but the performance shows the lingering aesthetic eects of the association between primitivism and a diseased white
mind. The Shadow is able to encounter the primitive, master it, and return
to his origins. The demented Carlin, however, is toppled by his own aspirations, which leave him stranded in the primitive. The power of the primitive
always threatens to turn on a weak patriarch.

SURROUNDINGS NOT HEALTHY FOR A WHITE MAN

This episode contrasts the Shadows disembodied intellect with primitive physicality, as dened by a lack of intellect and preference for violent
action. When the Shadow rst sees the natives paying deference to Carlin,
he observes, The primitive mind is eager to believe anything that savors of
the supernatural. But this statement hides the frame of performance of the
show itself, in which hordes of civilized listeners huddle close to the radio,
enthralled by a series that savors the supernatural in each episode. This audience would be duped into mass panic by Welless War of the Worlds only a few
months later. Titus Ensink has observed that the confusion of the listeners
in War of the Worlds resulted from interpretive ambiguity in the structure
of the text itself that led the listener to confuse activities within and outside
the play text itself.50 Hostility toward such ambiguity marks one dierence
between the mid-twentieth-century audience and earlier Victorian audiences,
which were more likely to derive pleasure from the mystery surrounding tricks
of technology.51 In contrast, mass media tricks that were not easily identied
and understood, like Welless War of the Worlds, were open to criticism and
censorship by the audience, which increasingly relied on radio as a method
of disseminating news and factual information. But for Welles the magician,
radio was an exciting new tool to play with narrative, and the manipulation
of the eyes and ears of an audience was the ultimate trick.
An Oedipal Detour in Algiers
Much like the episode of The Shadow discussed above, Welless performance
of Algiersan installment of the Campbell Playhouse seriesleads listeners
on an aural trip through fantasies of the exotic with a white, male protagonist
seeking redemption. Algiers came at a key time during Welless negotiations
with Campbell Soup to continue the radio show despite his move to Hollywood
and his lm contract with RKO. His radio career, increasingly subordinated to
his lm aspirations, was still a major source of income and reputation, as his
publicist Herb Drake indicated in a memo to Howard Benedict on August 2,
1939. Drake recounted that at one time [Welles] was doing 12 or 15 other programs each week in addition to The Shadow, and that the Campbell Playhouse
was extremely successful . . . placing 5th in some important manuals today
and winning many radio awards.52 He also mentions that the theater season,
with which Campbell Soup explicitly connected its show, was not very hot,
and he suggests that we dont go any further mentioning Five Kings [Welless
adaptation of Shakespeares history plays] now since Welles doesnt know what
hes going to do with the damn thing. At this time, Welles was moving away
from the adaptations of the classics that had been the focus of the Campbell
Playhouse and toward materials he felt had greater mass appeal.

SURROUNDINGS NOT HEALTHY FOR A WHITE MAN

As a result, Welles wrote a great deal of correspondence in this year regarding radio story ideas, which were negotiated among himself, Houseman,
and producer Diana Bourbon as a representative of Campbells production
agents, Ward Wheelock, Inc. This correspondence reveals increasing tensions
between the New York theater focus of Campbell Playhouse and Welless
increasing interest in developing his role as a lmmaker. The fall broadcast
schedule for the New Yorkbased Campbell Soup show conflicted with
Welless Los Angelesbased RKO contract and shooting schedule, which he
was already failing to fulll. Housemanuncomfortable with Hollywood,
the lm medium, and his relationship with Welleswanted to return to New
York and used Campbell Playhouse as an excuse, thus sparing himself further
embarrassment.53 Meanwhile, CBS and Campbell Soup were dabbling with the
idea of promoting a radio book club by adapting at least one book a month for
the show. This goal matched the original classics-for-the-masses mission of
the Mercury Theatre but not the changing goals of Houseman and Welles.54
Finally, Campbell Soup had a socially conservative agenda that did not match
Welless increasingly progressive political agenda. Correspondence between
Welles and representatives of Campbell Soup on August 16 and 29, 1939,
indicates that Campbells agent, Ward Wheelock, Inc., submitted the script
for Liliom to the Catholic Charities and Publicities Bureau on Welless behalf
because they were worried about oending the church. In September, they
tried to control Welless personal appearances and rejected his idea to employ
his lover Dolores Del Rio as a guest star, instead suggesting Frances Langford.
Wheelock wrote Welles, 1. You are trying to do too much. 2. We feel that your
going on the air in any other capacity is a dilution of your eorts for us. 3. That
you should be in New York on Friday morning as previously agreed.55
Welles countered Wheelocks strictures by arguing that his lm contract
demanded more independence from his radio show, as well as the innovation
of recording some installments of the show in Los Angeles. Welles argued
on October 2, 1939,
My movie obligations require me to deliver complete and fully cut
picture, ready for release by January 1st [. . .] last possible nishing date
for actual shooting is November 15th [. . .] fairest arrangement would
be for client to agree to Hollywood origination on those weeks during
shooting time [. . .] with the exception of the Barrymore [Christmas
Carol] broadcast [. . .] no reference to Hollywood should be made during the course of the program.
Into this power struggle came the radio performance of Algiers on October 8, 1939. The preceding week, Welles and Houseman had made Wheelock

SURROUNDINGS NOT HEALTHY FOR A WHITE MAN

very happy with a broadcast of The Count of Monte Cristo, which Houseman
had referred to in his telegram to Welles on September 19, 1939, as a rich
classic . . . Haha. He saw it as a book that Wheelock would consider to be
classic and as a way of avoiding the third bourgeois domestic story in row.
Wheelock loved the show, commenting in his October 3, 1939, wire to Welles
that it was one of the best things weve ever done and the best individual job
I ever heard on the air. Ominously, however, Diana Bourbon warned Welles
two days later, on October 5, to keep Ernest Chappell and our Hollywood
oce fully advised of all Playhouse developments. At this point, Chappell
was Campbells man in Hollywood and would be blisteringly chastised the
following week for letting Welles run amok with Algiers.
Welles vehemently defended the broadcast from a denigrating attack
by Diana Bourbon in a message to Chappell on October 9, 1939. Welles
dismissed the reactions of Bourbon and of the friends and CBS executives
who had listened to it with her, rejecting what he viewed as their bourgeois
values. He then reasserted his control of the broadcast event, arguing that
his work was artistic rather than commercial and denying that Chappell or
any representatives of CBS or Campbell should have signicant impact on
his broadcast. Algiers itself had been framed as an authentic slice of Casbah
reality, delivered to your living room by a knowledgeable guide: Welles. Thus
Welles xed himself as the mediator between audience and sponsor and between imagination and reality. Making listeners comfortable with the exotic
primitive tropes of modernism in American living rooms required a sense
of narrative timing and framing. Again reenacting Eliots journey through
the primitive, Welles served as the medium for listeners to experience the
Casbahbut only as a romantic imaginary locale, explored, overcome, and
rejected within fty minutes.
For Algiers to work as an identity detour in miniature, it rst needed to
be accepted by listeners as authentic. Welles prepared this eect a week in
advance, reading to the audience about the actual Casbah at the close of the
Monte Cristo broadcast. The following week, he opened the Algiers broadcast by reminding listeners of this description, saying, Take my word for it,
its authentic, because, believe it or not, your humble servant has lived in the
Casbah.56 He then described it as one of the wild and wicked cities of the
world where anything can happen and everything does. It was only a step
from the modern Algiers, but when you take that step, you enter another
world, a melting pot for all the sins of the world [. . .] and in that labyrinth
Pp le Moko is at homeand he is safe as long as he stays there.57
Like the earlier Voodoo Macbeth, Algiers uses aural cues to create the
mood of a romantic, supernatural locale capable of driving its male protago

SURROUNDINGS NOT HEALTHY FOR A WHITE MAN

nist into outlaw madness. The location became a key source of contention
between Welles and Diana Bourbon. She complained not only of the expense
of hiring authentic musicians but also of hearing Casbah street sounds in
her own living room and being unable to follow the narrative because of
them. Welles retorted on October 12, 1939, you insist that the Casbah is
background and I insist it is foreground.58 While the commercial interests
of CBS/Campbell Soup favored bourgeois domestic narrativesliterally stories that would please Bourbon and her associates as they listenedWelles
wanted to explore modernist expressionism and its psychic fragmentations,
particularly through images and settings that evoked primitivism. Algiers
was based on the 1938 Walter Wanger lm of the same name, which was
itself a remake of the 1937 French Pp le Moko. 59 After these two movies
the Casbah already held a reputation as a notorious area of corruption and
native depravity, and the popularity of the story depended on feeding the
audience imagination for its lthiness and vice.60
In her essay Entering Freuds Study, Marianna Torgovnick assesses
Freuds uneasy fascination with the primitive as it relates both to cultural
history and individual identity. She notes that Freud divides history into the
categories female/male and primitive/civilized. He then allies himself with
the triumphant categoriescivilized male.61 However, she also notes that
the rise of fascism destabilized these binary categories, since Nazi Germany
eroded the concept of Western civilization.62
Since World War II, the traditional formulation of a civilized, stable
(white) ego has given way to an ambivalent, uctuating model of identity in
which the old alliances are still invoked but with less condence. Identity in
this model becomes a geographic territory to be contested, negotiated with,
and ultimately conquered. Torgovnick asserts,
The mature ego is identied with the imperial city-state, which will
colonize primitives quite literally and colonize (in the gurative sense)
many feelings, including feelings of free sexuality and oceanic oneness.
The oceanic must be ousted from a place in the foreground because
it would displace the individualistic paternal line [. . .] to which Freud
wishes to trace civilization, its benets, and its discontents.63
Thus, the chaotic, multiethnic, oceanic sounds of the Casbah disturbed
listeners like Bourbon precisely because they were foregrounded, threatening
linear notions of identity that were customarily represented by nonoverlapping dialogue, continuity of character, and indications of xed masculine
American identityan obedient wife; a low, masculine voice; middle-class
American accents; the familiar, patrician tones of Orson Welles. In her

SURROUNDINGS NOT HEALTHY FOR A WHITE MAN

October 9 letter, Bourbon calls the show a sound-eects nightmare and

complains, my guests got up in a body and went and sat in my bedroom
where they couldnt hear the radio.64 In addition, Welles had relocated
Algiers as a parable of American identity, moving the ambiguity of the
narrative one step closer to Bourbon and her friends by making it about an
American couple touring Algiers. To Americanize the civilized/primitive
paradigm, Welles chose New York rather than the original texts Paris to
represent Western civilization, and the American characters nostalgically
invoke familiar New York markersZabars and Lindysto contrast the
lawless Casbah (Welles would again relocate the narrative frame from Europe
to New York in Heart of Darkness).
The broadcast drops the listener directly into the confusion of the Casbah.
The American couple nd themselves in an alley of thieves, looking at a bar
from which the Algerian detective Inspector Slimane warns them, Americans will be brought out feet rst. A police raid and shooting ensue, all in the
rst ve minutes of broadcast. Algiers featured guest star Paulette Goddard
as Gaby, an American woman who becomes intoxicated by the romance of
the Casbah and runs toward gunshots instead of away from them with her
anc, Richard. She lands right in the middle of a male contest for power
over the primitive, which will be fought over her body.65
Amid screams, gunre, and orders to shoot on sight, Gaby is pulled o the
street by Inspector Slimane, who murmurs in foreign tones, Here you will
be safe. She has just ed her tour group and Richard, a model of American
capitalism who sums up the Casbah as A lot of yelling, murdering savages.66
He would prefer to be in the safely commercial Monte Carlo, having disembarked from their ship in Algiers only because Gaby wanted to see it.
Gaby is a symbol of Richards wealth, and international jewel thief Pp
le Moko (Orson Welles) associates her with the diamonds she wears even
in the Casbah. But she is also a symbol of American upward mobility who
possesses an active nancial ambition. Money is her occupation, and when
Pp asks her, What did you do [. . .] Before the diamonds? She replies,
I wanted them.67 Revealing herself as a lower-class striver, she taps into
cultural connotations of class Otherness that allow her to bridge the gap
between the whiteness of moneyed Manhattan and the nonwhite Casbah.
She shares the suggestive indeterminacy associated by Peter Staneld with
Hollywoods use of jazz in the 1930s and 40s by means of which morally
suspect, lower-class, sexualized women are represented as literal or gurative
octoroons.68 Thus she appears both as the ultimate commodity prize and
as a transgressive force capable of either realizing or defeating the goals of
male protagonists. She is a greater gamble than any to be found in Monte

SURROUNDINGS NOT HEALTHY FOR A WHITE MAN

Carlo, and three men compete to win control of her in Algiers. The one
who controls Gaby will control the narrative as well, becoming the author
of the tale rather than a gure in it.
By the end, Algiers has become Slimanes story to tell; of the three men he
is the only one who leads Gaby rather than following her. She lures Richard o
the boat into Algiers and Pp out of the Casbah. In contrast, Slimane pulls her
o the streets and introduces her to Pp; he also connes her to her hotel and
eventually tricks her into leaving Algiers. Ultimately, he is the one who tells us
that Pp has been killed through the guise of an ocial memo of events. Like
so many of Welless narrators, Slimane has to compete for control of his text,
but in the end he controls the narration and thus the listeners sense of history.
Moving into the rst-person-singular mode of storytelling, this episode writes
itself simultaneously as a ctive personal history (Slimanes lived experience)
and as a memoir encasing a moment of cultural history (the police report of
an international political event that has happened in Algiers).
Slimane begins to take control of the narrative when Gaby leaves Richard
during the opening police raid, which was planned by the visiting inspector
from New York, Commissioner Hillier, and carried out against Slimanes
advice. Slimane plays the situation against the grain, taking advantage of a
temporary breakdown in white Western male powerthe convergence of
a bumbling police raid, a runaway ance, and an international jewel thief
beyond reach of the lawto gain control of the narrative prize, Gaby. It is a
shell game in which the sought-after object is ostensibly Pp. His lawlessness
represents a prohibited regression of the white subject, and his power lives
only within the realm of the Casbah, outside systems of material meaning
for American identity. He challenges traditional values like marriage and the
law by stepping outside the bounds of American commerce and culture, in
which male sexual desire feed[s] female material desirecaught in an urban
American web of class, race, and gender.69 Pp has transgressively chosen
the urban milieu of Algiers over that of New York and feeds his bounty to
his native lover, Ines.
Gabys power, in contrast to Pps, is specic and material. She circulates as an object of exchange in the world of law and commerce outside the
connes of the Casbah. Slimane steps into the gap of meaning and begins a
cultural and psychological marionette show, using each of the three white
intruders to control the others and bringing order from chaos by driving them
from the Casbah (or perhaps by exorcising the Casbah from them). Gaby is
drawn to Slimanes exotic world, and he uses her as the queen in a chess game,
manipulating her to move the other pieces where he wants them and using
Gabys body as a proxy for Pps.

SURROUNDINGS NOT HEALTHY FOR A WHITE MAN

As Gaby escapes Richard amid the gunre, we hear the noises that listeners like Bourbon found so disorienting: scripted sound eects such as Native
Screaming in pain as he is hit and a slight scream, medium o mike. Gaby
is pulled into a dierent world, sliding from the rigid capitalist national ego
into its ambivalently seductive id amid undierentiated Arabic Jabber. As
the Casbah chaos recedes, Slimane enters as a new not-quite-reassuring voice:
in formal but accented English diction he tries to soothe her: It will soon
be over, all this activity. 70 He has pulled her, however, into a refuge shared
by the injured Pp. Pp is not native to the Casbah. Like Gaby, he is a New
Yorker who willingly took a wrong turn, an identity detour. Eventually, she
will seduce Pp, and in the pursuit of her he will come out of the Casbah
and encounter civilization and death.
First removing the complex colonial undertones of the French original,
Welless adaptation depicts Algiers primarily as a place of sexual and romantic fantasy. Exoticism remains expressionistic for Welles, as it was in
the Voodoo Macbeth, but now embedded in the undierentiated crowd
sounds of the Casbah, which represent the psychic desires of his protagonists. This expressionist urge put Welles at odds with his sponsors, who
complained of its expense. Bourbon pointedly asked Ernest Chappell on
October 9, 1939, They also tell me you had 9 native musicians and a girl
singer. Is Orson paying for these [. . .]? 71 The larger conict, however, lay in
the broadcasts thematic and structural challenges to bourgeois individual
American identity.
American identity itself, embodied in Gabys New York-ness, seduces
Pp out of his haven. Overcome with emotion, he exclaims to Gaby, You
know what you are to me? New York! The whole town, thats you! Youre
lovelyyoure sensational! Do you know what you remind me of? The subway! 72 In addition to the obvious phallocentric metaphor of Gaby-as-tunnel, this speech indicates that Gaby now signies American civilization for
Pp. Embodying Stanelds ambiguous gurative octoroon, her body shifts
between the promises of primitive lawlessness and civilized power.73 When
contrasted to the darker body of Pps native lover, Ines, Gaby shines white.
Gabys allure is that of the ego reasserting itself over a wayward, childish
impulse that is explicitly associated with the lawlessness of the Casbah.
Pps struggle to choose between Gaby and Ines poses a choice between two
concepts of himself: one embracing a capitalist Western worldview and associated with maturity, the other turning toward exotic, alluring regression
and labeled deviantan Oedipal primitive that enjoys the exotic journey
and thus defers the return home to engage the symbolic fathers of law and
nation.74 Hence Welless assertion in the introduction to the broadcast that

SURROUNDINGS NOT HEALTHY FOR A WHITE MAN

in that labyrinth [of the Casbah] Pp le Moko is at homeand he is safe

as long as he stays there. 75
Like Lloyd Carlin, Pp has absolute power over the dark regions until
he is disturbed by challenges from his original civilized world. In Freudian terms, his stay in the Casbah is a temporary regression, a rejection of
his responsibility to assert ego over id and to take the prominent place of
the father. It represents the location of great power for him, but only the
temporary power of lawlessness. His stay there is a self-destructive regression, a seductive trap. He describes his time there to Gaby as walking in
my sleep or being in a hole, and to Ines as like being in a grave. 76 Such a
dark, deadly place inevitably cannot harbor him for long.
Gabys appearance triggers Pps desire to return to the Oedipal quest of
capitalist civilization, but too late. His compromised white identity is unable
to survive outside the dark region, and his very ambivalence between the
two spaces of primitive and civilized kills him. His divided attraction to both
the classic symbols of civilized New York and the primitive sensations of his
locale prove fatal. In contrast to Pp, Inspector Slimane understands and
excels at the rules of the game of power. In a twist of The White God plot,
this time the native Slimane wins the battle with his white counterpart over
meaning. Once again, however, the diseased white male ego is destroyed by
its very divided nature. Unlike the protagonist of the French lm version,
Welless Pp is not a villain. Around Gaby, he seems more desperate than
controlling and more tormented than violent.
The inspector is a key gure in both the narrative and the controversy the
broadcast provoked. He is depicted as the director of the plot. When he uses
Gaby to set up Pp, turning white female seduction against the protagonist,
he is also a manifestation of the symbolic civilized father. However, he is
also a native voice. Like Gaby, his meaning shifts between primitive and
civilized according to context and interpretation. One of Diana Bourbons
complaints about Algiers was that Slimanes voice was not masculine
enough: Whoever played Slimane was bad too[. . . . W]hy the high pitched
piping voice? Theres nothing in the script to justify the supposition that
Slimane was a eunuch. 77 Welles responded,
Is an edict to go out that Algierians [sic] are henceforth to be played
with low voices? (There is considerable internal evidence and some
justication in the French movie script and in the French performance
of Slimane, for the assumption that he, Slimane, was a eunuch, although
I take it that you meant that as sarcasm.)78
This debate over Slimanes eectiveness as a character centers on his masculinity and the manifestation of his sexual power via a voice on the radio.

SURROUNDINGS NOT HEALTHY FOR A WHITE MAN

Thus high voice, small penis becomes the performance equation that
Bourbon hears, and this voice is particularly unsettling coming from a native man who defeats the savvy American hero. Interestingly, the highness
of the characters voice operated as a type of blackface, rendering the real
actor, Ray Collins, unrecognizable to Bourbon, despite the fact that he was
regularly featured in Campbell Playhouse and Mercury Theatre on the Air.
This cultural invisibility t the character perfectly, since Slimanes power
lies in his ambiguity, his shape-shifting ability to manipulate one power
structure against another. Thus he controls Gaby by controlling Richard; he
controls Pp and Richard by controlling Gaby, and he controls his civilized
superior, New York Commissioner Hillier, by controlling Pp.
Welles vehemently defended Collinss portrayal and furthermore asserted
on October 12 that any challenge to his players was a challenge to himself:
Ray was wonderful, and at this point I must protest against esthetic discussion between you and Chappell about performances by actors, over whose
eorts mine is the sole authority. Like Slimane, Welles was struggling to
maintain control of his narrative, competing with commercial interests and
a collaborative production process to gather the components of the episode
and show under a single name: Orson Welles.
As Slimane is introducing Commissioner Hillier to the Casbah, aural cues
highlight his ability to manipulate elements of the environment. Slimane
points out slaves from the Sudan, the Moorish architecture and commerce
of the street, and the Arab women who are slaves from the Grand Atlas. 79
All the while, there is native singing in the background, and we hear Slimane shoo away an Arab woman, who approaches to beg. Slimane is Hilliers
and the audiences guide to the cacophony of the Casbah, introducing the
white tourist to its exoticism even while keeping it at a safe distance. His
ability to shoo away intruding forces acts within the narrative as the technological security of the radio operates in the listeners living room: the white
bourgeois audience can experience the illusion of interaction without the
complexities that would arise from any real cultural exchangewithout
intimacy, without touching or being touched. Ray Collins himself provides
a further buer, since our authentic Casbah guide is in fact a mere simulator
of Algerian presence.
Further emphasizing Slimanes sense of control, the aural structure of the
broadcast takes the form of a countdown to Pps arrest. When Slimane
introduces Pp to Gaby, he informs him that he has already marked the
date of his arrest on his wall, high upwhere it reads black in the rays of
the setting sun! To catch Pp, he has to lure him out of the Casbah, and he
knows that Pp will follow the bait of the white woman. As the inspector
wryly comments, the bait is taken. . . . for the sh to be taken, the bait must

SURROUNDINGS NOT HEALTHY FOR A WHITE MAN

be jerked away.80 Slimane jerks Gaby away by telling her Pp is dead and
putting her on a boat out of Algiers. When Pp leaves the Casbah only to see
Gaby sailing away, he runs toward the end of the dock, calling her name as
if he will swim to her. The police shoot him. As he dies, Slimane apologizes
to him, explaining that they had to shoot him so he would not escape; he in
turn explains that he has escaped, at least spiritually.
Physical death becomes psychic reincarnation in this tale of the Oedipal
primitive. Pps time in the Casbah was a digressionas the audiences has
beenand to attain a white male identity, he must both seek the (white) girl
and die for her. In the paradigm of white consciousness trapped by a detour
into the primitive, death is preferable to regression. The story functions as
a cautionary parable, a type of patriarchal corrective. Pp could not have
returned to white civilization without threatening its very structure. Detours
into the primitive are dangerous things, and those who linger too long, like
Lloyd Carlin and Pp le Moko, risk losing not only their identities but also
their lives. Such detours are more safely simulated via whiteness, wrapped in
buering layers of technology and fantasy that entice and entertain without
risking mutual contact.
A Familiar Other: Going Native in Heart of Darkness
One of the most famous stories using the paradigm of white consciousness
lured into and destroyed by primitive regression is Joseph Conrads Heart of
Darkness, and it was this text Welles chose for his opening RKO project. A
generation before Francis Ford Coppola adapted Conrads tale as a metaphor
for white American colonialism in Vietnam, Welles chose Kurtz and Marlow
to embody his vision of divided American consciousness. Welles strongly
identied with the characters in Heart of Darkness, which he performed twice
on the radio, rst as part of the Mercury Theatre on the Air (November 6, 1938),
then again seven years later as part of the series This Is My Best (March 13,
1945). Houseman remembers that Welles saw Kurtz as a young man rather
like himself, with a ance who was rather like Virginia.81 In many ways, the
lm was to be a visual manifestation of his concept of rst-person-singular
narration, with Welles originally intended to play both Marlow and Kurtz,
thus focusing the lm very plainly on the externalization of an interior moral
conict. In the plot treatment, Marlow is described as the rst person singular (An American 15 years older than Kurtz).82 By stipulating a dierence in
ages, Welles set up the story as that of a white mans struggle between youthful
desire, which Kurtz acts out on native bodies, and mature restraint, represented by the nonsexual relationship of Marlow with The Intendedwho
in Welless version comes up the river with Marlow in search of Kurtz. Like

SURROUNDINGS NOT HEALTHY FOR A WHITE MAN

Margo and Gaby, the Intended acts as an icon of whiteness, drawing the
protagonist back from his identity detour in the heart of darkness.
The terrain in Welless lm was to be an exotic, unspecied locale, not
necessarily Africa. A three-page plot treatment submitted by Herb Drake
describes a jungle river of no particular continent or island. It is just a place
of mystery.83 It would be the setting of an Everymans moral dilemma. Welles
postulated that there is something waiting for us all in the dark alleyways
of the world, and he marks this dark world as non-European: aboriginally
loathsome, immeasurable, and certainly nameless. In other words, the locale
would be as far as possible from his audiences concept of home.84
As in the White God and Algiers radio performances, Welles sought
to portray an authentic fantasy of the primitive, depicting native consciousness as an abstract, undierentiated force capable of seducing the white
visitor, and using footage and sounds that had come to signify primitive
cultures for the audience. The process of constructing the darkness in
Heart of Darkness was one of collage. Welles sent a variety of assistants to
research media images of the primitive and bring him the best snippets for
his project. He sent Richard Baer to the Los Angeles County Museum to
make a survey of all the primitive races of the world with the idea of creating a composite native.85
This composite native would be pieced together from images in previous performances, creating a familiar Other based on sights and sounds
of primitive cultures that t the fantasies of the white American public.
RKO memos indicate that Welles sent research assistants to search stock
footage of Africa and jungles for location shots. Notes from August 15, 1939,
show he paid twenty-ve hundred dollars for one hundred feet of lm from
Dark Rapture (although he later complained that it showed only insects).
He reviewed a variety of other jungle lms as well, in part to avoid the costs
of location shooting but also to create a collage vision of Hollywoods ideal
primitive setting. A urry of memos from his assistants to RKO in fall 1939
yields a list of studio lms reviewed by Welles for his Heart of Darkness project: Cannibal Caravan, White Woman, Baboona, Jungle Madness, Crouching
Beast, Congorilla, and Sanders of the River. He was primarily interested in
straight center shots of a jungle river, and these seem to have been largely
unavailable, but he did order excerpts with masks, chants, dances, and the
sounds of medicine men. Welles also culled images from his earlier stage
and radio productions, and from the script for his radio Heart of Darkness
in particular. The lm cast was largely composed of Mercury actors, plus
Jack Carter from his Voodoo Macbeth. Conversely, many actors hired for
the lm were promised radio roles as part of their contracts.

SURROUNDINGS NOT HEALTHY FOR A WHITE MAN

As an author, Conrad seems a better t than Dickens for a cinematic adaptation by Welles because he shares Welless ambivalent fascination with
capitalist imperialism and race relations. As Patrick Brantlinger has noted,
there is an interesting connection between Conrads era and Welless, in that
nineteenth-century imperialism prepared the ground in which fascism and
Nazism took root[.]86 If one theme recurs throughout Welless work at this
stage in his career, it is an aversion to fascism, and as Michael Anderegg
notes, the antifascistic theme is the only connection between Welless rst
two proposed lms for RKO.87 This was a theme Welles had taken from stage
to radio to screen. His 1937 stage production of Julius Caesar, described as an
allegory of fascism, was widely praised by critics of the time.88 The proposed
lms Mexican Melodrama and Smiler with a Knife, as well as his 1945 radio
broadcast of Heart of Darkness, all depict the dangers of fascism.89
The Revised Estimating Script for Heart of Darkness demonstrates a
clear focus on fascism and eugenics, as well as a debt to the narrative structure and expressionist primitivism of the earlier Mercury Theatre radio
performance. The principal feature shared by the radio and lm adaptations
was the representation of primitive culture via the sound of drums, native
dances, and songs, juxtaposed with an extremely complex construction of
storytelling itself. Conrads Heart of Darkness uses a bifurcated structure
that is associated with modernist interrogations of subjectivity, and Welles
worked the theme of the divided self into his critique of fascism.90
The rst problem of adaptation was how to handle the divided self in
narration, particularly since Welles wanted to make the lm a rst-person
narrative. In the novel, we are told the story of Kurtz through a nameless
narrator who introduces Marlow, who in turn relates his encounter with
Kurtz. Marlow tells a story that is an interrogation of storytelling and is
placed against a background of imperialism, violence, eccentric genius and
exploitationall issues that not only fascinated Welles but also were at the
heart of his negotiations with RKO. He was vividly aware of how the concept
of individual genius could be celebrated both commercially and culturally,
even as the genius himself was being exploited by the Company.
The radio versions awkward use of Welles as an opening narrator (labeled
author) is replaced in the lm script with an introduction by Welles-ashimself, to be followed by his performance as both Marlow and Kurtz. The
1938 radio version is quite short, taking only half of the one-hour broadcast.91
Yet, despite the short amount of time he had to tell the story, Welles delayed
the start of the narrative to praise Conrads work in his own voice, calling it
a deliberate masterpiece, or a downright incantation, a ne piece of prose
work at the least. Its best aspects are an artful compound of sympathy for

SURROUNDINGS NOT HEALTHY FOR A WHITE MAN

humankind and a high tragical disgust. This preface prepares the listener to
contemplate the meaning of Kurtzs nal wordsThe horror. The horror
by raising the prospects of both sympathy and disgust well in advance.
The question of what so horries the horrifying Kurtz draws varying responses from criticsis the tale a critique of imperialism, or a reproduction
of it? Is Kurtz horried by himself, by death, by his encounter with primitive
civilization, or by the lies (personal, imperial, and capitalist) that facilitated
his encounter? As Brantlinger suggests, this debate is rendered irresolvable
by the structure of the original narrative, which is heavily imbedded in the
double, contradictory purpose of modernist impressionism that Frederic
Jameson deems schizophrenic.92 Welless adaptations reproduce these ambivalences and ambiguities and update them to a modern political context.
The material contexts of Welless lm, however, were far from ambiguous
in terms of their racism. From the audio and visual symbolic representations
of primitivism, to the pay structure of the racially marked roles, the overall
structure of the lm was racist. Guerric DeBona asserts, Welles deploys
the side of Conrads modernism which wants to make us see, but he rejects
the Other side of fascistic, racist modernism in which whiteness is validated
through blackness.93 But while it is true that Welles was averse to racism
and fascism politically, the material conditions of his art reproduced patterns of both racism and oppression. For example, Welless use of unnamed
stock characters like Native Woman and Flogged Native allowed white
actors like Welles and Dita Parlo (tentatively cast as the Intended) to have
extended screen time and receive elevated salaries, while his pursuit of cheap
stock footage of the Dark Continent from pictures like Sanders of the River
positioned black characters as two-dimensional stock characters.94 His movie
was not to be so very dierent from the other jungle lms of the day.
If the Heart of Darkness radio broadcast is any indication of what the lm
might have become, Welles would have used markers of primitivism similar
to those in his Voodoo Macbeth, The White God, and Algiers. The radio
broadcast was peppered with Welless usual expressionist referents: beating
drums, native chants that sound suspiciously like Southern spirituals, and
the sounds of white racial fantasies of blackness generally. The racist context
of the lm becomes even clearer in the elaborately specic project contracts,
scripts, and correspondence. As Brantlinger again points out, the ctional
voice in Heart of Darkness that could critique imperialism most forcefully
would be that of Kurtzs Congolese mistress, who though described in
glowing detail, is given no voice[. . . .] Kurtzs black mistress knows all; its
unfortunate that Marlow did not think to interview her.95 The same marginalized and silent black female presence is imbedded in Welless script,

SURROUNDINGS NOT HEALTHY FOR A WHITE MAN

only this time we have evidence of her value to the commercial narrative
through salary estimates. The contrast between white and black femininity is rendered more explicit in Welless lm, since The Intendedgiven
the name Elsa in the lmwould have a substantial part and be played by
Parlo with a possible salary of twenty-ve thousand dollars. In contrast,
Native Woman was never cast and was expected to be paid seventy-ve to
a hundred dollars. Her small part in the novel was even further diminished
in the screenplay.
In lm production, unlike most literary production, author and text
are explicitly regulated within a commercial, capitalist context prior to
production of the text itself. When RKO put pressure on Welles to cut costs
in the winter of 1939, the parts of the movie the studio wanted to cut rst
were precisely the ones that interrogated subjectivity, fascism, and race
relationsthe roles to be played by actors of color and Welless own deconstructive introduction. By and large this was not a censorship initiative but
rather a budgetary choice that was promptedironicallyby the rise of
European fascism.
The rst whi of economic trouble with the picture came in a September
15, 1939, telegram to Welles from George Schaefer. Trying to assess the impact of the European situation on the movie business and concerned about
curfews in London and theater closures in Paris, Schaefer warned that
People are hesitant to congregate in theatres both in France and
England[. . . .] I must make personal plea to you to eliminate every
dollar and for that matter every nickel possible from Heart of Darkness script[. . . .] we should conne ourselves to a top of ve hundred
thousand dollars[. . . .] wont you please therefore go over your script
and eliminate every dollar possible.96
Welles seems to have wanted to please Schaefer, and in his notes for a
responding telegram he promised every eort will be made to keep Heart
of Darkness within or below budget[. . . .] condence is expensive. Im trying very hard to be worth it.97 Nevertheless, his December 12, 1939, budget
estimates reect anticipated costs ranging from 984,620 to more than 1
million. In an eort to cut the budget, salary reductions were planned. Elsa
(still uncast but identied in handwritten notes as Parlo) had a salary cut
from 25,000 to 22,000. The lowest-paid roles received salary cuts as well:
Native Woman (sometimes referred to as Savage Woman) had a salary reduction from 150 to 70, and Flogge[d] Natives salary was cut from 467 to
116.98 Jack Carter maintained his 1,000 as Half-Breed or Steersman, which
came to approximately 200 a week, a comparatively high salary. Almost all

SURROUNDINGS NOT HEALTHY FOR A WHITE MAN

the other actors salaries were maintained or slightly increased, and all white
actors were paid more than the highest-paid black actor, Carter.99 In contrast
Welless line item for acting (not including directing and supervision) was
30,000.100 The shooting schedule, dated November 28, 1939, indicates that
George Coulouris, as A Portugese,101 a role of similar stature to Jack Carters
Steersman, was getting 1,000 a week, guaranteed for ve weeks (and he had
already been paid 5,666 in preproduction). Native Woman was scheduled
for only two days of shooting, eventually reduced further to one day, while
Flogged Native got three days shooting and four days idle, for a total of
seven days. Apparently, it took much longer to portray on-screen interracial
violence than on-screen interracial love.
Shooting white romance, in contrast, took both time and money. Elsa
was budgeted for thirty-two days shooting and thirty-six days idle for a total
of sixty-eight days, the most shooting days and most idle days of any actor
listed (Welles was not assigned days). The material racism underlying this
project is stark. Welless lm could not avoid racism in its means of production, much less in its on-screen representations. So how does one reconcile
the inherent racism of this Hollywood production with the progressivism
of its author-director? Perhaps the answer can be found in the similarity of
Welless lm to its literary source, since both are bedeviled by ambiguities
regarding their potential as either revolutionary or reactionary propaganda.
Brantlinger observes that Conrads text was politically progressive in that
its critique of imperialism came out prior to most similar critiques. This
observation would apply to Welless critique of commercial exploitation and
race relations as well. But Brantlinger adds, As social criticism, [Conrads
novels] anti-imperialist message is undercut by its racism, by its reactionary
political attitudes, by its impressionism.102 The same can be said of Welless
lm: his political intentions are undermined by the very structure of his
narrative and the means of its production.
We can understand how critics like DeBona see Welles as attempting
to free us from racial ideas of the primitive.103 But Welless interrogations
of subjectivity, of modernization in the form of science (particularly racial
classication), and of fascism, fall short of challenging modernist primitivism. The real hope that this Conradian narrative could be redeemed from its
inherent political ambivalence would have been its emphasis on self-critique.
Kurtz, for example, is a critic of his own text who undermines his treatise on
humane race relations by writing Kill all the brutes at the end of it.104 With
this sudden, irrational revelation of hatred, he undercuts the very concept
of rational narrative and reveals the schizophrenic I behind the text. This
narrative I is haunted by lust for the primitive and repulsion from it.

SURROUNDINGS NOT HEALTHY FOR A WHITE MAN

Welless introduction, which features the electrocution of the audience,

is the technical equivalent of Kurtzs revealing statement in his manifesto,
Kill all the brutes! But Welless statement occurs in the prologue, preceding
his text, and the viewers (readers) are positioned as both brutes and victims.
First, the prologue calls attention to the brutal manipulation of the viewer
by technology. Then Marlows preparations for his journey bring out scientic disregard for humanitythe viewers experience their own heads being
measured along with Marlow in preparation for their role in scientic study.
The viewer is quickly positioned to read her visual journey with a sense of
irony and skepticism.
Racial exploitation is enabled by the idea of a fascinating primitive that
helps dene the civilized in opposition, and this opposition is established in
both the novel and the lm by the juxtaposition of Kurtzs native mistress
and the Intended. The script leaves no doubt that the Intended and Native
Woman were designed to fascinate the viewer, and that this fascination
would be key to the commercial success of the lm, despite the fact that
the actresses unequal salaries did not reect their characters comparable
narrative value. The plot summary describes the Intended as a major factor
in the marketing of the lm, establishing a heteronormative racist model
that represents civilized love in contrast to primitive desire. A revised plot
summary on September 15, 1939, promised, We dont know who she is yet
but she is going to be a great beauty . . . virginal quality. The girl is to be sexy
without waving her hips around. She is to have a calm, half-smiling face,
perhaps over a full bosom, for instance. In a sentence, the girl is eager but
unfullled. Similarly, in an undated character list, Elsa, listed only as girl,
is described as representing love and required to make us believe she is
in possession of that ame.105 In the heteronormative, capitalist equation
of desire, girl = love = commodity.
Native Woman contrastingly receives no description at all and is given
little value in terms of salary or screen time. She has no motivation as a
character, no personhood. She simply represents silence, the forbidden, the
unconsciousthe darkness at the heart of the narrative. She acts as a double
for the Intended: like Ines and Gaby, they are a pair in which one must be
denied for the other to be embraced.
In contrast to Native Woman, Jack Carters character is given depth
through his status as mixed, making him a marker of the tragic failure
of whiteness, the fear of and desire for miscegenation. Mixed Breed is
described in the character list as
The expatriate, tragic exile who cant remember the sound of his own
language. He might have been a chief but [was] brought into slavery

SURROUNDINGS NOT HEALTHY FOR A WHITE MAN

and demeaned in the services of elements he doesnt understand; a

wild, proud beast born in a cage, he will never even guess why he is
miserable.106
This tragic mulatto clich character reects the legacy of romantic racialism.
The characters alliance with whiteness, however, gives him a higher monetary
value within the means of production than a black female character. Although
the Intended and Mixed Breed are two-dimensional stereotypes of white
patriarchy, they are both awarded the ability to speak, and they speak to the
experience of whiteness. Native woman has no such language. Both in the
novel and in each of Welless adaptations, she remains in silence and darkness,
at the heart of the narrative but marginalized by the mechanisms of production, with few lines and a low salary. She is to be seen, not heard or paid.
The eye that does most of the seeing was to be Welless. He at rst intended to play both Marlow and Kurtz and to open the lm by introducing
himself to the audience as a rst-person guide preparing to take them into
the heart of darkness. In both Conrads and Welless tales, the rst-person
approach to engaging the audience emphasizes the psychic rather than the
geographic nature of the journey. Perhaps, as Patrick Brantlinger argues
about the original text, it matters [. . .] little whether we say the story takes
place in Leopolds Congo or in some purely imaginary landscape.107 Welles
makes this imaginary landscape explicit by refusing to ground the action
in a specic time and location and by using Marlow as a literal eye for the
audience. The mirroring function of Africa in the original text is manifest
not only in the physical similarities between Kurtz and Marlow in Welless
lm script but also in the role of Marlow as a camera or mirror for the audience.108 The other characters speak to the audience through Marlow, who is
supposed to act as a register for the audiences emotions, a sort of funhouse
mirror that can mediate or distort the image reected in it.
Audience engagement was key to the success of the narrative and key to
the studio pitch to make the lm. The camera was to embody Marlows gaze
and thus that of the audience, steering viewers while Welles narrated via the
soundtrack. When Kurtz spoke, it would be straight into Marlows camera
eye.109 Critics tend to see this as an awkward and limiting strategy for the
portrayal of Marlow,110 but it would have maintained the psychological focus of
the narrative and kept Welles in place as mediator of the narrative, a role that
was key to his RKO contract and his budding reputation as an auteur.111
Despite the racist dimensions of its production, the lm marks Welless
rst attempt at using cinema for political critique. In it he links fascism to
an unhealthy interest in exploring the metaphorical darkness at the center
of the story. He suggests again, as in Algiers, that the identity detour,

SURROUNDINGS NOT HEALTHY FOR A WHITE MAN

although enormously compelling, will kill you. In an early scene, Marlow

has his head measured with calipers by a doctor in preparation for his trip.
Since Marlow is the camera, the eect is that audience members are getting
their own heads measured.
doctor (contd) I always ask leave, in the interests of science, to measure the crania of those going out there.
marlows voice: And when they come back, too?
[The Doctor hastily lowers his props.]
doctor: Oh, I never see them . . .112
So we set out with Marlow on a journey from which we know we wont return,
suspicious of the commercial and scientic voices that sponsor the journey.
Framing the journey as an interrogation of subjectivity, Welles forcefully positions the audience as the subjects of the lm through the prologue (further
discussed in chapter 1). While this positioning of the viewer adds a layer of
self-criticism to the lm and represents a gesture toward solidarity between
civilized protagonist and primitive background, it does little to undermine
the structural racism at the core of both the story and the lm. The narrative itself suers from the marginalization of the nonwhite perspective and
a fascination with primitivist tropes like cannibalism and the supernatural,
not to mention those ever-present tom-toms.
Welless lm is fascinating, however, in its ability to adapt the narrative
ambivalence of the original text into mass media. Welles exhibits the same
uneasiness with modernity and with the very tools of his own narrative
production that Conrad deploys. Welless ambivalence operates continually
in two registers: within the narrative and in the external process of production (Welless relationship with RKO and his use of cinematic technology). Structurally, the prologue performs the same layering eect as does
Conrads rst, nameless narrator, who introduces us to Marlow and his
story. The prologue illustrates Welless own idea of collage, which tests the
conventional notions of authorship and adaptation. Even in the prologue,
expressionist references to whiteness are juxtaposed with the jazz sounds
of darkness, constant reminders of Marlows split identity. Just as Kurtzs
murderous outburst undermines his rational analysis of conditions in the
Congo, structural racism consistently undermines Welless own resistance to
fascism and espousal of populist politics. Finally, like Conrad, Welles retains
a suspicion that his two protagonists, the narrator, and the author himself
are all linked to the lies and propaganda circulated by the Company. Ultimately, his doubts would proliferate and destroy the lm itself. Both Welles
and RKO eventually became so suspicious of the ambiguity of the narrative

SURROUNDINGS NOT HEALTHY FOR A WHITE MAN

itself that they shelved a project that might have proved to be as revealing
and controversial as the novel from which it was adapted. In particular,
his development of two techniques, rst-person collage and expressionist
primitivism, would have shed light on his emerging performance aesthetic
as it developed concurrently on stage, radio, and lm.
First-Person Collage in Heart of Darkness
In the original Heart of Darkness, we meet the narrator in the fog of the
Thames. Just as he did with Algiers, however, Welles makes Heart of Darkness into a parable about New York and American identity. We meet our
narrator after seeing a collage of pictures and sounds from Manhattan, with
echoes of African American culture setting the tone for the blackness-withinwhiteness of the production: In Central Park, snatches of jazz music is [sic]
heard from the radios in the moving taxicabs.113 Robert Spadoni suggests
that the throb of tom-toms foreshadow the jungle music of the story to
come.114 The collage represents Marlows consciousness, for he, much like
Pp, is a displaced American whose national psyche is fragmented between
binaries of civilized and primitive.115
Next Marlow is shown at a map shop on an empty business street in
some Central European seaport town. He decides to make the journey to
the Congo and is sent for a physical examination with the head-measuring
doctor, who also establishes Marlows national and racial identity, referring
to him as a Good Nordic type and telling him that hes his rst American
patient.116 But these proclamations of who he is (and by extension, who the
audience is, since Welles asserted in the prologue that this experience is
happening to viewers via the cameras gaze) are undermined when Marlow
chances to meet Elsa. She is walking toward the camera and thus toward
the viewers and Marlows gaze:
As she comes closer and closer we see she is very beautiful. There is
a look of recognition on her face. Finally she comes face to face with
camera. Both stop. She lls the frame, looking directly at the lens.
The look of recognition on her face fades and changes to one of slight
embarrassment.
elsa: Im sorry.117
Marlows identity is to be bifurcated not only through geographic dislocationan American working for Europeans in Africabut also through
his physical similarity to Kurtz. The tangible presence of an observer, Elsa,
throws Marlows identity into crisis. Through her awareness of Marlows
similarity to Kurtz, her every look undermines the concept of I that is so

SURROUNDINGS NOT HEALTHY FOR A WHITE MAN

central to the narrative and to Welless formulation of eye = I laid out in the
prologue. If our eyes are not Is, then who are we?118 The answer is another
collage or pastiche, the self as the product of cultural bricolage.119
Audio Expressionist Identication
As the lm proceeds, we hear the expressionist sounds of two competing
worlds: that of white civilization, represented by Elsa and classical piano
music, and that of the dark primitive, represented yet again by native drums
and sometimes by their more intimidating and contrasting partner, silence.
References to whiteness are juxtaposed with the sounds of darkness to give
us constant reminders of Marlows split identity.
When Marlow encounters Elsa again and is formally introduced to her,
she is at the Companys base camp, listening to her friend Eddie play the
piano and remembering when she and Eddie rst met in Venice. Like Gaby,
she is instantly allied with white civilization, including money. She and the
music provide a stark contrast to Marlows rst impression of the primitive
wilderness outside the colonial camp:
Marlows Voice: outside the silent wilderness surrounded this cleared
speck on the earth, great and invincible, like evil or truthwaiting
patiently. The riverglittering, glitteringowed broadly by without
a murmur [. . .] the silence of the land went home to ones very hearta
great silence around and above. Perhaps on some quiet nightthe
tremor of far-o drumsSound of drums.120
The central elements of Welless Heart of Darkness are strikingly similar
to those of Algiers. The sounds of the Casbah are replaced by drums, but
again the Girl is a tool used to lure a white male consciousness that has gone
native out of dark chaos and back into white civilization, even though it will
be lethal for the man to leave the darkness. Instead of the civilized native,
Slimane, Marlow manipulates the Girl and the natives to master the tale and
emerge as the nal narrator. Like Slimane, Marlow is a hybrid of primitivism
and whiteness. And just as in the radio episode of Heart of Darkness, Welles
himself provides a rhetorical frame for this journey by introducing himself
as the master author of our experience, a position made all the more explicit by the prologue, in which he visualizes his power over the audience
by feeding us as caged canaries, ring a gun at us, and electrocuting us in
the death chamber.121
Elsas role is central to Welless adaptation. She not only accompanies
Marlow for most of his journey but actually draws him a map of the river
and its stations, cautioning him that the stretch of river past Station 3 is

SURROUNDINGS NOT HEALTHY FOR A WHITE MAN

unexplored[. . . .] There are cannibals. Mr. Kurtz is somewhere here. Elsa

also links Kurtz to European fascism. She says, There was no good reason
for sending him to the Dark Countryexcept to get him out of Europe; Hes
just a demagogue in a uniform to a foreigner, to somebody who doesnt know
him.122 But the narrative is more complex than pure antifascist propaganda,
since Kurtz does not embody pure fascism or unmixed whiteness.
Rather, both Kurtz and Marlow acquire power through their ability to
incorporate darkness into whiteness without becoming darkness itself, and
this is the model of masculinity Elsa celebrates. Mere whiteness in a dark
locale shows itself to be ineectual, easily burned (literally) and victimized.
Marlow seeks to balance himself between ineectual whiteness and savage darkness. As he discusses his uneasy interaction with the cannibals,
he articulates a desire to distance himself from the unsavory whiteness of
the Company. Excessive whiteness in a man is associated with fascism and
also with weaknessfor example in the likes of the head-measuring Doctor
and De Tirpitz, the leader of Station 2, whom Elsa describes as a bad blue
blood.123 After killing Carbs and the Steersman, the cannibals (displaced
from the boat to the jungle in Welless version) approach the boat, but only
to ask that Marlow and his men bring the bad tribes back for them to eat.
Marlow wonders aloud,
Why they didnt go for usI dont know. They were thirty to ve[. . . . ]
It occurred to me I might be eaten by them before very long, but I admit
that just then I sawin a new light, as it werehow unwholesome the
Company men looked, and I hoped, yes, I actually hoped, that I wasnt
quite soso unappetizing.124
The darkness that Marlow must master is represented aurally by drums
and silence, as in the earlier Wellesian performances. Marlow often narrates reectively over the sound of the drums: even in the boat, the drums
are heard over soundtrack. Like Hecate, whose incantations silenced the
drums to demarcate scene breaks in the Voodoo Macbeth, Marlow often
talks over the drums just before a dramatic moment or a scene change. For
example, as Marlows party reaches the last outpost of civilization, Station
3, the rhythm of drums changes. It is now even more violent, even faster,
even louder, as we dissolve. They have entered the territory that Elsa earlier
warned is unexplored[. . . .] There are cannibals. Mr. Kurtz is somewhere
here. As they move into this uncharted territory, the Steersman, looking
at the jungle, warns, Those in therethey know that magic.125 Steersman,
as a half-breed, can articulate the supernatural powers of the primitive
because he has intimate knowledge of darkness.

SURROUNDINGS NOT HEALTHY FOR A WHITE MAN

The Steersman, Kurtz, and Marlow all straddle categories of light and
dark. White fascists like De Tirpitz continually misinterpret darkness and
therefore fail to master it. Discovering that the natives have steel-tipped
arrows, De Tirpitz cries, The natives are getting civilized quick. This was
the stone age until just lately! The more perceptive Marlow identies the
source of this civilization, concluding that Mr. Kurtz had taken a high
seat amongst the devils of the landI mean literallydissolve out.126
Even while maintaining the traditional association of the primitive with the
infernal, Marlow recognizes Kurtzs hand. He is able to locate the point of
intersection between civilized and primitive precisely because he and Kurtz
both mark this intersection.
Several structural choices make the nature of Kurtz and the horror of
going native appear tangibly to both the boat crew and the audience.
First, there is the opening of the story in Manhattan, during which Marlow
talks directly to the audience and brings the narrative home, so to speak.
Second, Marlow and the crew encounter Kurtzs barbarity in the form of
human heads mounted on poles, and some of them are white human heads.
De Tirpitz remarks, Thats how Kurtz and the rest of them got their power
back in Europe. This shouldnt surprise you. Youve seen this kind of thing
in the city streets.127
Marlow and De Tirpitz seem at rst to interpret Kurtz very similarly, but
the divergence in their perspectives becomes clear when they encounter Kurtz
himself. Marlow, the hybrid American, is revealed as Kurtzs doppelganger,
while De Tirpitz, the bad blue blood from Europe is shown to be a weak substitute for Kurtz. Marlows meeting with Kurtz is a type of mirror moment, an
encounter with subjectivity and moral ambiguity as articulated through racial
metonym, and Kurtz recognizes it as such. Marlow still shares the cameras
perspective, taking the audience with him into the subjective encounter as
well. Kurtz and Marlow meet in a temple covered with skulls, and Kurtz is
seated on a throne. Kurtz asks for a cigarette and reaches out below frame
of camera. He brings his hand back with the cigarette in it [. . . ].128 In eect,
the audience has just handed a murderer a cigarette.
Kurtz acknowledges the power of the mirror moment and recognizes his
encounter with Marlow as a portent of death. Like Pp, he has regressed
too far to return.
kurtz: Im dying(he looks keenly into lens of camera, straight into
Marlows eyes) Youre American. Whats your name?
marlows voice: Marlow.
kurtz: Im Kurtz. You look like mea little

SURROUNDINGS NOT HEALTHY FOR A WHITE MAN

On the words a little camera moves back slightly and lowers a

trifle from the extreme closeup of Kurtz face, indicating that Marlow
has stepped down and back. Kurtz settles back on his throne.
kurtz: (looking straight at Marlow)The image of GodI can use
you.129
Several key terms of Kurtzs identity as both man and god are put into play in
this scene: the personal name, the national name, an act of self-identication,
and a comparison of subjective agency to omnipotence. In this place such
naming categories are contested, thrown into doubt and then reasserted.
Kurtz and Marlow are both in a no-mans land, literally. They are operating
beyond the bounds of traditional identity politics. They form an alliance
as Marlow gives helpful answers to Kurtzs questions and pairs Kurtz and
himself as an us versus the them of his own boat crew. This moment shifts
the poles of us/them, white/black, and civilized/primitive binaries, since it
is suggested that white fascism is a worse thing than the feared black cannibalism. De Tirpitz is audibly one of them (civilized white men), and when
Kurtz hears his voice he asks Marlow, How many more of them? Marlow
answers, Sixcounting me. To which Kurtz, acknowledging their alliance, responds, Im not counting you. Youd never understand.130 Kurtzs
perspective separates Marlow from white civilization, a shift in perspective
Marlow is just starting to make.
Echoing Marlows earlier repulsion from whiteness when looking through
cannibal eyes, Kurtz assures him that neither he nor the cannibals will eat
the crew because The superior races are not very palatable. Kurtz and
Marlow are both capable of distancing themselves from the indigestibility of
other whites, but only Kurtz goes the extra step of allying himself with the
cannibals. Nevertheless, it is De Tirpitz rather than Marlow who is shown
to be a bastard son of Kurtzs highly unusual style of leadership. True, Kurtz
is part fascist, but as the Intended has already told us, it would be a mistake
to locate his hybrid power within the connes of fascism. De Tirpitz, on the
other hand, is a true European dictator. Kurtz greets him as a son and places
him on the throne, crying out, The rst real dictatorship!131 Kurtz knows,
however, that De Tirpitz will fail to rule the primitive darkness under him.
The next time we see De Tirpitz is when the natives carry his head out on a
pole as Kurtz is leaving on the boat. De Tirpitzs fascism is a poor substitute
for the more complicated hybrid power of Kurtz.132
Welles presents Kurtz in Heart of Darkness as similar to Lloyd Carlin in
The White God. Explaining his power to Marlow, he says,

SURROUNDINGS NOT HEALTHY FOR A WHITE MAN

kurtz: Im more than a hero already. Not to you, of courseto my

people. [. . .] My race,the superior race. For them Im more than a
god. Im every one of them. Think of it, Marlow. Im a whole nations
long, golden dream[. . . .] Everything Ive done up here has been done
according to the method of my Government.Everything. Theres
a man now in Europe trying to do what Ive done in the jungle. He
will fail. In his madness he thinks he cant failbut he will. A brute
can rule only brutes.133
A brute can rule only brutes, and a white god can only show light against a
background of darkness. Kurtzs aspirations to rule the world are unrealizable
outside the heart of darkness. He can succeed only in the jungle. In addition, once Kurtz crosses the psychic color linerepresented by a gendered
color line via the body of Native Womanhe is unable to make the transition back to whiteness and survive. When he looks at Native Woman on his
way out of the jungle, he not only rejects her but is repulsed by her: Kurtz
turns his head slowly to her and looks her full in the face, an expression of
psychic hang-overof exhausted lust, cosmic disgust. [. . .] Kurtz looks away
from her, forwardand the litter proceeds past camera right as wedissolve out. Hers was the specic body on which he practiced his power
over darkness, but it is also the body that taints his psyche to the point of
death. Once she is taken by Kurtz, he cannot fully remove himself from her.
In fact, his body is her geographical territory. A sexual cannibal, she has
invaded it and conquered his whiteness. As he departs she makes her way
through the crowd of natives and oers him a lament that turns to a curse
as she summons a deadly storm: She comes out to the bank, further than the
rest, and stretches her arms toward the boat.134 The girl can still be made
out through the gunre smoke as lightning from a thunderstorm comes up
behind her. The thunderstorm starts a re in the jungle that spreads until
it totally surrounds the boat, and Kurtzs nal words, The horror, refer to
the storm itself. Kurtz dies during the storm, and his lifeless body is tossed
into the river. Native Woman ultimately reclaims Kurtz by ruling the jungle
and its dark magic.
Kurtz loses his power when he moves outside the deepest realms of the
jungle, just as Pp loses his power when he moves outside the Casbah, but
Kurtz does not lose the power to haunt his double, Marlow. After Kurtzs
death the camera perspective shifts as though we are being carried on a
stretcher. Marlows encounter with Kurtz, and with the heart of darkness
within the psyche, literally makes him ill. The audience experiences this
illness through distortions of perception and a mixing of visual and audio
cues. One shot (described as tricky) shows us Marlows delirium through

SURROUNDINGS NOT HEALTHY FOR A WHITE MAN

cannibal eyes: Understand that Marlow is now coming down with a fever.
In other words he sees things. This is the rst thing he sees. Instead of a
piece of meat on the plate, Kurtz is on the plate now, and as Marlow stares
at the plate, Kurtz crawls o of it and o the frame.135 Kurtz haunts the lm
as an apparition, appearing often accompanied by the sound of drums that
conjure visual images.136 Marlow next sees Kurtz with Elsa.
I saw him again.Months later, at the foot of the riverI saw him.
With Elsa.I saw those eyesthat wide immense stare condemning,
loathing the whole universepiercing enough to penetrate all the
hearts that beat in the darkness.137
Marlows voice-over conjures a silhouette image of the jungle procession
with Kurtz on a stretcher, which merges into the image of the river, as Into
the music [creeps] the suggestion of drums.138 Marlow contemplates these
sights and sounds, ltering the audiences impressions:
marlows voice (narrating) Yes, he lived then before me. The vision
entered the house with methe stretcher, the phantom-bearer,
the wild crowd of worshipers [. . .] the beat of the drums, regular
and mued like the beating of a heartthe heart of a conquering
darkness.139
Whiteness returns only when the remedy for this acoustic and visual
darkness, Elsa, enters and brings her love-song waltz, which is faintly heard
on the soundtrack. The desirable mixture of white European civilization and
primitive darkness is once again achieved through the white female body,
which appears as a psychic antidote to the dangerous seductiveness of Native
Woman. As Elsa remembers Kurtz and his noble character, Imperceptibly, the
waltz has merged into music reminiscent and suggestive of the jungle, ominous
but also sorrowful and very faint.140 Elsa does not embody hybrid power, but
rather enables it within the psyche of the male protagonist. Like Miss Hoyt and
Gaby before her, she provides the medium through which the protagonist can
conjure the sights and sounds of a whiteness asserted over darkness, forcefully
subordinating the primitive within the psyche of civilization.
The nal scene in Welless Heart of Darkness emphasizes the ambivalence
of this hybrid power in terms of a conict between truth and illusion. It is a
power based on manipulation rather than epistemological accuracy. Marlow
lies to Elsa, just as Conrads Marlow lied to the Intended, saying that Kurtzs last
spoken words were her name. But Welless Marlow also turns the question of
truth on the audience: Marlow looks into lens of camera, straight into the eyes
of the audience and asks, Should I have told her the truth?141 To appropriate Brantlingers assessment of Conrad, Welles questions or mocks his own

SURROUNDINGS NOT HEALTHY FOR A WHITE MAN

voice, his own talent for ction making, for lying.142 Finally, Welless Marlow
asserts the necessity of the lie of whiteness, saying, I couldnt. I couldnt tell
her. It would have been too darktoo dark altogether(pause).143 Truth lies
silent in the shadows of the white lies of civilization, a critique of whiteness
within the ambivalent heart of darkness.
The September promotional pitch to RKO had acknowledged Heart of
Darknesss complex exploration of white sexual and racial fantasy, specically promising to show
two moderns who have a hell of an adventure in the dark places of the
earth. The idea is, more or less by implication, that this is the Goddamndest relation between a man and woman ever put on the screen.
It is denitely NOT love in the tropics [. . .] Everyone and everything
is just a bit o normal, just a little obliqueall this being the result
of the strange nature of their workthat is, operating as exploiters in
surroundings not healthy for a white man.144
Distancing the lm from the sentimentality of romantic racialism (not love
in the tropics), the plot treatment instead places it in the context of a curious
and tentative critique of the exploitive nature of whiteness. The exploration
of the dark primitive at the heart of whiteness is labeled abnormal, oblique
and strange, as well as not healthy for the white protagonist.
The White God, Algiers, and Heart of Darkness all explore the theme
of diseased white consciousness tainted by fascination with and yet failure
to master the primitive. Invoking T. S. Eliots auditory imagination, each
performance fuses fantasies of primitivism with political references to modern life, positioning them as inextricably linked. Rather than being shockingly unorthodox in its treatment of racial themes,145 Heart of Darkness
invokes a tradition of modernist fascination with the primitive as a means
of self-expression, coupled with a tentative embrace of populist politics and
self-critique.
The Commercial Limits of Wellesian Primitivism
The downfall of the lm seems to have been mainly scal. The censors had
few problems with the script, and Joseph Breens response to it refers only
cursorily to the racial imagery, asking Welles to please take care to avoid
any possible inference of miscegenation and to watch the representations of
native dress, since the breasts of the women must be covered at all times.146
But Welles was taking too long to lm and spending too much money. The
movie failed to promise a protthe rst requirement of any Hollywood
studio, particularly in the nervous wartime setting. Despite Welless prom

SURROUNDINGS NOT HEALTHY FOR A WHITE MAN

ise to Schaefer to cut costs, a series of December memos indicates extreme

tension between RKO and Welles over the budget. On December 7, 1939,
Eddie Donahoe sent Welles information on the budget of Swiss Family
Robinson, which had been cut down to 596,000. Donahoe said, These
gures probably drive you nuts which they rightly should, but I only sent
you this information so you wont feel so bad about making eliminations in
The Heart of Darkness[. . . . ] it certainly isnt a hopeless task. The meeting
Donahoe and Welles had just attended with RKO had not gone well. After
making budget reductions they anticipated a budget for Heart of Darkness
of 984,620 and a shooting schedule of eighty-three days.147 In other words,
he was producing his rst lm at a rate roughly half as fast and twice as
expensive as comparable projects under way at the time.148
Welless failure to work within the rigid commercial confines of the
studio system may, in fact, be one of his greatest legacies to independent
lm makers. His disdain for conventional methods of script production and
shooting left a rich inheritance of experimentation to those who followed. It
was also, however, enormously frustrating to those who sought to regiment
the nancial conditions of lmmaking. The diculty of getting Welles to
work within the prot model of commercial production was described by
his attorney Arnold Weissberger in a letter to Richard Baer:
I should like to make clear to you the reason for the nancial jam which
now exists. As you know, most large money earners in Hollywood [. . .]
are kept on fairly stringent budgets and are told what they may and may
not spend. Orson does not like to conduct his aairs in that way[. . . .]
The expenses are incurred rst, and then we have to see that payment
is made in the best possible way. All along the chief diculty has been
that Orsons expenditures have anticipated his income so that he has
always been in the red. Had there not been this unexpectedly long delay
in the moving picture, sucient funds would now be on hand to have
gotten Orson straightened out[. . . .] I have been to see Schaefer and
am trying to get him to agree to advance us some of the movie money
before shooting actually commences, but most of that will at once be
used up when Columbia repays itself for these advances.149
This detailed explanation demonstrates that Welles found himself in trouble
with Heart of Darkness not because his vision of race relations was too progressive or his notion of narrative too experimental but because he refused to
work within the economic conventions of classical Hollywood lmmaking.
RKO eventually had to cover the 160,000 Welles had already spent on the
lm and shelve the entire project.

SURROUNDINGS NOT HEALTHY FOR A WHITE MAN

Welless use of the primitive in stage, radio, and unnished cinema narratives is fascinating in its rearticulation of modernist primitivism through the
perspective of romantic racialism and in its attempt to represent a divided
rst-person singular. His vision, however, was far from revolutionary within
the context of literary tradition. The same critique that Patrick Brantlinger
oers of Joseph Conrad could easily apply to Welles: Conrad must have
recognized his own complicity and seen himself as at least potentially a
Kurtz-like gure[. . . .] the African wilderness serves as a mirror, in whose
darkness Conrad/Marlow sees a death-pale self-image named Kurtz. Welles
embraced Kurtzs form of heroism, which consisted of staring into the abyss
of nihilism.150 Like Conrad, Welles was a master at questioning or mocking
his own narrative. Had it made it to the screen, this self-critical, ambivalent
lm would have posed an interesting challenge to modern viewers. Marlow
would have embodied a psychological struggle over racist imperialism and
fascism. But he would also remain an unrepentant liar, and lying within the
framework of rst-person storytelling conjures the abyss of modern identity
as a constantly performed and renegotiated act: as the lie expands outward
from selfhood to cultural and national identity, the modern tips ever toward
the postmodern. Eventually the quest for Truth detours into the pleasures
of ction. Welless ambivalence toward the lies of ction would remain a
preoccupying theme of his work, nowhere more so than in his next and nal
unnished RKO project, the ironically named Its All True.

Figure 1. Orson Welles, 1938, in a promotional photo for Heart of Darkness.

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8daaZXi^dc8ZciZg[dg8gZVi^kZE]did\gVe]n!Jc^kZgh^ind[6g^odcV#&.-.6g^odcV7dVgYd[GZ\Zcih#

Figure 2. Welles in makeup to play the role of Kurtz

in Heart of Darkness.
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Figure 3. Jack Carter and Edna Thomas as the Macbeths in the 1936 WPA production.
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Figure 4. Welles in a publicity still for the Rio project.

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Figure 5. Welles and Jiminy

Cricket in a promotional photo
for the 1941 Lady Esther CBS
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Figure 6. Photographic still

from Its All True. 8djgiZhnd[
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I]ZJc^kZgh^ind[B^X]^\VcHeZX^Va8daaZX"
i^dch!6cc6gWdg#

Figure 7. Welles with a Brazilian crowd. Photographic still from Its

All True. 8djgiZhnd[G^X]VgYL^ahdcDghdcLZaaZh8daaZXi^dc!I]ZJc^kZgh^ind[B^X]^\Vc
HeZX^Va8daaZXi^dch!6cc6gWdg#

Figure 8. Jangadeiros for the Four Men on a Raft section of Its All
True. E]did\gVe]^Xhi^aaXdjgiZhnd[G^X]VgYL^ahdcDghdcLZaaZh8daaZXi^dc!I]ZJc^kZgh^ind[
B^X]^\VcHeZX^Va8daaZXi^dch!6cc6gWdg#

Figure 9. Photographs of jangadeiros from the beach of Iracema.

8djgiZhnd[I]ZA^aanA^WgVgn!>cY^VcVJc^kZgh^in!7addb^c\idc#

Figure 10. Grande Othelo cooking. Photographic still from Its All True.
8djgiZhnd[G^X]VgYL^ahdcDghdcLZaaZh8daaZXi^dc!I]ZJc^kZgh^ind[B^X]^\VcHeZX^Va8daaZXi^dch!6cc6gWdg#

Figure 11. Publicity photograph of Welles arriving in Brazil on February 9, 1942.

8djgiZhnd[G^X]VgYL^ahdcDghdcLZaaZh8daaZXi^dc!I]ZJc^kZgh^ind[B^X]^\VcHeZX^Va8daaZXi^dch!6cc6gWdg#

2WP_cTa#
R Is for Real: Documentary Fiction in Its All True
As readers or viewers we also believe that the texts we engage with
are true as stories (and no less true for being stories).
Linda Ruth Williams, Critical Desire:
Psychoanalysis and the Literary Subject

While the narrative mode discussed in the previous chapter depends heavily on imperialist binaries of white/black, good/evil, and civilized/primitive
to engage modernist primitivism and couple it with romantic racialism,
Welless use of ethnicity in narrative held a dierent nuance when he attempted to distance his work from ction and portray it as reality. His
nal failed project for RKO was the Pan-American lm Its All True (Figure
4). Although this project went through a variety of incarnations, it remained
preoccupied at every step with exploring the gap between truth and ction
in cinema, and its narrative structure was indebted to the style of simulated
news reportage that Welles had developed on the radio. In fact, when we look
for clues regarding what the nal lm product might have resembled, one
of the best sources is the November 1942 Hello Americans radio broadcast
regarding Brazil.
Originally conceived as a trilogy of stories centered on North American
tales of conquest, Welles shifted the focus of Its All True to South America
following his arrival in Brazil. The project is inextricably linked to the political
climate of its time, developed in large part as anti-Axis, pro-Ally propaganda.1
Welles embarked on the project at the behest of both RKO and its shareholder
Nelson Rockefeller, who conceived of the project as a possible entre into new
Latin American markets in the wake of European theater blackouts, and as a
patriotic endeavor on behalf of the Good Neighbor policy aimed at securing Pan-American alliances in World War II. These overtly commercial and
political goals, however, led to an innovative narrative goal on Welless part:

R IS FOR REAL

to create a polyglot visual narrative, dependent on no single language but

rather on music and image, and thus accessible to audiences of any class and
culture. The nonlinear narrative ambitiously sought not only to represent but
also to create a postcolonial Pan-American identity.
This ambitious attempt to explore postcolonial identity was problematically told via a white North American visitor to South American culture,
one of a set of conditions that contributed to the projects failure. Wartime
politics and travel restrictions limited studio supervision, allowing Welles
to operate in comparative isolation in Brazil and freeing him to explore his
philosophical and political aspirations on lm. His experimentation, however, did not serve RKOs more conventional entertainment goals, creating
friction between Welles and the studio. In addition, he was unable to dislodge
himself from the position of privileged observer of his subjects, particularly
the jangadeiros,2 and his narrative attempt at unstructured, polyglot truth
ultimately failed. The lm itself was relegated rst to RKOs lm vault and
then largely to the open sea. 3
Critical discussions of this unnished lm tend to explore its artistic
value and hypothesize about what it might have looked like in its nished
state. Equally interesting, however, is the study of this project as it currently
exists: on paper, on lm, and in folklore, still conceptual rather than realized.
It represents ambitious concepts regarding narrative experimentation and
the ultimate rejection of these concepts by Hollywood, the governments of
Brazil and the United States, and even Welles himself. As Catherine Benamou points out, Welless suggestion that this picture would act as a type of
magazine feature departed from the very concept of individual authorship
toward an author-function that is destabilized and unxed.4 Describing
his concept in a prologue to a plot treatment titled Carnaval: Treatment
for the Film Itself, Welles says,
This is a picture divided into several parts. It is not, however, an arbitrary selection of short subjects, nor is it vaudeville.
This is a new sort of picture.
It is neither a play, nor a novel in movie formit is a magazine.
carnaval as a sequence in this picture can best be understood if we
consider it as an item in a magazineas a feature story, not as a short
story.5
While this prologue echoes that of Heart of Darkness in its desire for
experimentation with narrative form, it goes even farther by rejecting the
concept of traditional authorship. The concept for Its All True exaggerated
Welless previous adaptation and shooting strategies by operating without a

R IS FOR REAL

xed script and improvising a highly collaborative production. The project

challenged cultural values of the time, including RKOs desire for quick
commercial success and mainstream conventions of entertainment narrative.6 But it also tied back to a cultural fascination with documentary
expression that had emerged via ctionalized historical accounts like the
March of Time radio series.7 When Welles experimented with documentary
ction, however, he also tended to disrupt concepts of linear narrative and
meaning, often disorienting his audiences. Sometimes, as in War of the
Worlds, this audience disorientation could be labeled a success. At other
times the audience resisted his experiments. For example, Welles conceived
his new Lady Esther radio series as an almanac featuring the character of
Jiminy Cricket as Welless interrupting and questioning sidekick (Figure 5).
As Je Wilson points out, audiences responded tepidly at best to this narrative experiment. Surveys revealed that audience members found his shows
confusing, scary, and weird.8
The very mechanisms of production were set against a project that simultaneously experimented with the concept of visual narrative, pushed the
envelope of contemporary politics and race relations, and reworked traditional production concepts of the sequence of casting, scripting, directing,
and editing.9 Welles was crushed not by the studio system or the political
climate but by his own production strategies, scripting process, and the aesthetic goal of documentary ction, which were at odds with the equipment,
nances, people, and political milieu that he needed to transform the lm
from concept into product.10
Merging Politics and Fiction
Its All True represented a new incarnation of Welless recurrent preoccupation with documentary ction. To make the classics compelling to a modern
audience, Welles had repeatedly infused his stage and radio adaptations with
cultural politics. For example, he revived his successful stage adaptation of
Shakespeares Julius Caesarcharged with references to modern fascism
for his radio show with the result of stirring contemporary political opinion.
The potential power of this conjunction between narrative experimentation
and political meaning fully emerged in his War of the Worlds broadcast,
which successfully exploited an American culture of prewar fear and created
truth from ction for many listeners.11
Specically, Welles used a widely recognized news-media format that
was associated with truth but that he deployed for the purpose of ction.
The conjunction of a format associated with truth and a ctitious content
created powerful confusion in his audience in terms of their interpretation

R IS FOR REAL

of his audio cues. When tied to the contemporary political climate and told
from the limited point of view of a rst-person narrator, the strength of this
confusion increased to the point of panic.12
For Welles, the panic he created with War of the Worlds helped solidify
not only his career but also his concept of the power of ction to reveal emotional truths and to focus the political consciousness of an audience. He had
played with the idea of art as political commentary throughout his career, but
with the advent of World War II his antifascist leanings took on a new public
and commercial importance and infused his literary endeavors. Antifascist
themes link several of his productions that otherwise have little in common,
such as the 1935 stage adaptation of Panic, the RKO detective lm Smiler
with a Knife, and his unnished Heart of Darkness. This interest in wrapping
contemporary political reality inside literary vehicles became manifest in a
desire for political legitimacy within the ction of many of his productions.
In the case of the Rio project, as was true in his earlier studies of the primitive, this sense of authenticity connected to ethnographic representation,
often conveyed both aurally and visually.
Welles relied heavily on sound to make the audience feel they were experiencing an authentic cultural dierence. For example, in his Voodoo Macbeth,
he hired drummers to create a sense of real Haitian voodoo at work in the
theater. In his radio play Algiers he incurred the wrath of his sponsors by
similarly spending a great deal of money on musicians to recreate authentic
Casbah sounds. For Heart of Darkness, he sent his assistant to the library to
research anthropological traits of primitive cultures in the eort to create
a composite native.13 Its All True represents one more step in these inclinations through its intended concept: to visit a culture during a ritual moment
of celebration, Rios Carnival, and then to re-create this culture in great detail
both in studio and on location, focusing in particular on its music.
Carnival itself holds a revolutionary connotation, even within its own
culture, as a time of inversion and exploration of class power and dierence.
Stephanie Dennison and Lisa Shaw explain the multitiered manifestations of
Carnival that Welles sought to capture with lm and music:
In the rst years of the twentieth century three separate carnivals were
held in Rio de Janeiro: rstly that of the poor, largely Afro-Brazilian
population, in the central Praa de Onze district [. . .] secondly, that of
the middle classes in the Avenida Central [. . .] and thirdly, that of the
wealthy, white elite, which centered on lavish costume balls.14
Welles wanted to capture the beauty and celebration of a multiclass, multirace Pan-American identity, and what better place to explore this boundarylessness than Rio de Janeiro during Carnival?

R IS FOR REAL

Its All True represented a culmination of Welless eorts to merge contemporary politics and ction, but it also represented the tragic limitations
of such acts of simulation, which are inherently corrupted by the means of
their production. Welless eort resulted in the drowning of the Brazilian
national hero, the shermanpolitical activist Jacar, during a simulation
of reality. In an eort to manufacture the spectacle of social liberation,
Welles endangered the body of his cinematic subject, which in the case of
documentary ction is all too real. Despite earnest attempts to compensate
the family of Jacar and to turn the lm into an homage to the lost sherman,15 he created an unintended narrative reality from his eorts to assert
ethnographic authenticity. His lm became submerged in studio reluctance
and red tape, and parts of it were literally thrown in the ocean by the studio,
making it the last of his unmade RKO lm projects.
Its All True is fascinating in its overt rejection by the political entertainment culture that created it. Between Welless arrival in Rio at the beginning
of 1942 and Jacars death during lming in May, the local media, the governments of both Brazil and the United States, and RKO all lost enthusiasm for
the project and for Welles himself. The ambitious structure of the proposed
lm employs each of the narrative styles discussed in previous chapters
rst-person narration, serialization, expressionist primitivismwith the goal
of creating a new genre of documentary ction highlighted by the title of
the lm. If Heart of Darkness promised an element of self-referentiality, Its
All True put self-critique of white subjectivity at the heart of the narrative
structure itself, consciously eroding the gap between signier and signied,
revealing the seams between truth and ction.
Traditional Melodramatic Scripts for the Rio Project
Whereas traditional, classic Hollywood lms tended to use the sights and
sounds of exoticism to reinforce whiteness, Welles wanted to use Its All True
as a challenge to studio concepts of audience, narrative, and distribution.
The dierence between his script (or lack thereof) and studio expectations
is clear in the draft script Ricks American Bar, a story idea for lming in
Rio that follows a formulaic storyline familiar to RKO executives.16 This
script gives a good idea of what the U. S. government and RKO expected
from their political entertainment: a shallow critique of American racism
and South American fascism, surrounded by a traditional melodrama. The
protagonist in this script is Dick, a young military American pilot (read
good American) who meets a rened but greedy and self-centered former
American plantation owner, Marybell, who is obsessed with segregation
and diamonds (read bad American). The lm depicts the emancipation of
slaves in both the United States and Brazil as a product of benecent white

R IS FOR REAL

liberators. White femininity in particular is positioned in relative privilege

to enslaved blackness. One shot describes the white hand of the empress
handing blacks an order of the abolition of slavery in Brazil in 1888. Marybell is also a gure of privilege, but she rejects desegregation and admits to
Dick that she moved from Georgia to Brazil to avoid abolition and be able
to own slaves. She even conscates books from one of her slaves who has
been named after Abraham Lincoln and refuses to observe the tradition of
freeing slaves who nd diamonds over 18 carats.17 As a bad American, she
rejects ideals of democracy and enfranchisement, and symbolizes American
racism displaced into a South American context.
When Brazilian emancipation does arrive, Marybell becomes a landlord of
sharecroppers, exploiting black workers in Brazil. Her own children eventually reject her, marrying native Brazilians and refusing to enter her house.
Doubtless this promiscegenation subplot would have limited the lms appeal in the segregated American South, and in the 1942 radio piece for Hello
Americans, all similar miscegenation references were explicitly removed
from draft scripts, in favor of the themes of democracy and modernization
in Brazil. Ricks American Bar represents American capitalism and racism
in a critical light, since Marybell ultimately chooses commerce over family
and sends her husband away in search of the diamonds. The viewer gets an
instructional lesson in all Marybell has lost through racial segregation, symbolized by her lust for diamonds. At the end of the lm script, we learn that
the bartender who sent Dick to meet her is actually her estranged husband,
Charlie, who ostensibly sends her diamonds from the jungle every month.
In reality, Charlie sends her fake diamonds from the ACME Novelty Glass
Company to assuage her greed.
With all the depth of a Warner Brothers cartoon, we see that ACME glass
is a means for the good, moral Charlie to appease Marybell without capitulating to her racism and greed. The lm is a none-too-subtle exhortation for
wartime sacrice and honor, as well as an exploration of the tactics of collaboration and betrayal. Viewers could praise the simplistic Dick, who visits the
homes of strangers in the hope of good Southern home cookin and returns
the diamond hidden in his pocket to the racist old lady who put it there. Dick
and Charlie keep Marybells illusions alive while critiquing her perspective,
judging her racist exploitation without disrupting it. Similarly, the lm would
have oered a toothless critique of American white imperialism.
This rejected storyline focuses on the critique of the stereotype of Southern racism and the embrace of jingoistic American ideals of honesty and
tolerance through a traditional white male perspective. The script ignores
Brazilian subjectivity and the realities of Brazilian quotidian life. It simply

R IS FOR REAL

relocates white imperialism against an exotic background, and in a direct

reference to the white European nature of its perspective, the one prominent
black character in the script is Marybells faithful servant, Othello.
Despite the shallowness of Ricks American Bar, we can see several
connections between it and Welless concept for Its All True. Welles seems
to have had little to do with this script, but it evokes several of the actual
projects preoccupying themes: the denition of wartime American responsibilities against a Pan-American background, the exploration of lies versus
truth in narrative, and the positioning of white experience ltered through
a black facilitator (in the nal script, our guide to the samba section of the
lm would be the musician Grande Othelo).
Another wartime adventure appears in a draft script also written for (but
not by) Welles. This script apparently was inspired by a conversation Welles
had with the unspecied author18 and shares many traits with Citizen Kane,
namely an interrogation of identity told through a retrospective attempt to
piece together one mans reality. It also shares with Ricks American Bar
the preoccupation with wartime American responsibility and confusion
about reality. The revised version of this untitled script stresses that its not
really a war story, since More than 90 of the action takes place in Rio de
Janeiro in the winter of 1942 during Carnival. It promises to use ve full
reels of actual footage of Carnival, implicitly gathered by Welles on his trip
to Brazil. This treatment opens with the statement, A man and his identity
are not easily separated. When it does happen, the most basic of all emotional
conicts is involved . . . the denial of life itself.19
Like Citizen Kane and Heart of Darkness, this lm would interrogate the
emotional life of identity, how it is constructed and destroyed, specically
through white male heterosexuality. Our protagonist, Michael Gard, is a
wartime pilot like Dick, but he is battling amnesia after a crash of his ghter
jet in Belgium. He remembers the apparent death of his mistress, Ludmilla
Koren, a Jewish refugee pursued by the Gestapo for documents her father had.
But this will not be Michaels nal reality, and facts are withheld or distorted
through the narrative as told by the wounded and disoriented Michael. As
the plot treatment suggests, Since we are not telling the story in straight-line
narration, we are apt to court for ourselves more confusion than is necessary
or desirable. The main idea is to create a compelling lie at the center of the
lm that will motivate the audiences sympathies and nationalistic spirit:
Ludmilla has supposedly been chased down and killed during Carnival, thus
infusing the previously neutral Michael with anti-Axis passion. Michael
and the audience share a limited perspective, and [a]ll through the picture
Michael and the audience must believe the girl is dead. 20

R IS FOR REAL

Michaels national and personal identities are united in his memory of

both Ludmilla and his role as a ghter for the United States. He learns his
name, nation, and marital status at the same climactic nal moment of
the lm, when he looks down at his dog tags, and sees (with the audience)
Lieutenant Michael S. Gard, U.S. Army Air force . . . (he looks up, whispers)
next of kinLudmilla Gard, wife.21 The story is politically progressive in
the sense that Michael and Ludmilla marry across religious boundaries,
again raising the taboo miscegenation motif. But the narrative still fails
to engage Brazilian subjectivity. Instead, it is common Hollywood studio
melodrama, starring familiar white subjects once again displaced against
an exotic background.
The approach Welles wanted to take is far more radical than either of
these scripts, in both structure and content. Structurally, Welles wanted
to attempt a type of pastiche that embodies postmodernity, bringing together fragments of narrative from a variety of sources and mixing various
perspectives with suggestive and contradictory aural cues of narration and
music, interrupting his role as narrator with Brazilian voices, sounds, and
music. Benamou locates as many as seven potential scripted episodes for the
lm that emerge between June 1941 and September 1943, with three Latin
American episodes most tangibly developed.22 Most later versions of the
conceptual framework for the lm include one episode focused on Mexico
and already partially lmed by Norman Foster, another portraying Brazilian
life through Rios Carnival, and a nal segment to be lmed in Peru.23 The
Brazilian portion of the lm would itself have multiple layers, featuring the
jangadeiros revolutionary sailing trip to Rio but relocating it in time to the
eve of Carnival to create a transition from their story to a cultural examination of samba during Carnival.
The samba portion replaced a segment of the lm intended to explore African American jazz,24 marking a shift in Welless exploration of the primitive
and the exotic. Up to this point, Welles had primarily used images of blacknesseither African or African Americanto symbolize the primitive or the
exotic, but with his Rio project, he began to focus on Latin American images
of exoticism. Brazil provided an excellent transitional locale for this paradigmatic shift in Welless career and reinforced his fascination with borderland
cultures like Moorish Spain and the American Southwest in which ambiguous, racially indeterminate identity has more resonance than do simplistic
black-white binaries.25 Peter Staneld suggests that mainstream Hollywood
traditionally uses jazz music and blues on soundtracks to give a sense of urban primitivism by adding a smearing of blackness on a world otherwise
imagined as white.26 But increasingly Welles perceived American identity as a

R IS FOR REAL

collage of smears, still placed on a white background, but holding multicolored

hues. Its All True was positioned by Welles and his handlers as a challenge
to the supercial tactic of urban primitivism, as a more authentic look into
samba culture, resonant of a newly emerging Pan-American identity.
As in Heart of Darkness, however, the methods of lm production were
exclusionary and therefore could not easily challenge a paradigm of white
exploitation. The filming of Its All True depended largely on dramatic
reenactment and thus utilized the traditional mechanisms of mainstream
Hollywood lm production, even as it aligned itself with the genre of documentary rather than ction. Unable to catch much of Carnival on lm due
to technical, logistical, and personal problems, Welles restaged it. He also
staged the arrival of the jangadeiros as they sailed into Rio, which had happened months earlier and in fact provided the inspiration for their inclusion
in the lm via a Time magazine article on December 8, 1941.
From Ambersons to Rio: The Concept of Its All True
There were several reasons for choosing to do Its All True on the heels of
The Magnicent Ambersons. Herb Drake outlined these reasons in a letter
to Tom Pettey on February 4, 1942. Personally, it was a good t, since Welles
planned to include his love interest at the time, Dolores Del Rio, in the Brazil
epic. It was also seen as aligning Welles with the rising nationalist tide of
war interest, especially since it represented a partnership between Hollywood
and the government as part of the Good Neighbor policy. In an inated
description of Welless mission, Drake asserted that he would be the most
important Hollywoodite working for hemisphere solidarity. 27 This goal of
Pan American unity achieved through propaganda lms is reiterated in government and studio documents and would reappear in the Hello Americans
broadcast as well. The trip to Brazil would also get Welles out of Hollywood,
where according to Drake he had been considerably oversold [. . .] the past
few months, newspapers are a little tired of Welles activity, we need a lull.
In addition, the whole shooting schedule was anticipated to be short, four
or ve months altogether.28 The project was seen as a quick and easy method
of handling Welles, which correspondence indicates was a stressful project
for RKO as well as for his own lawyer and publicity men.29
In contrast to these pragmatic reasons for selecting the project, however,
Welles was drawn to a Pan-American narrative for aesthetic and political reasons of his own that were often at odds with the motivations of RKO and the
U.S. government. Welles wanted to use lm to examine lower-class Brazilian
life as well as upper-class life, studying Carnival as a momentary intersection of class and race (Figures 6 and 7). Although Welles set out to critique

R IS FOR REAL

the concept of free and enslaved territories throughout the Americas as a

whole, he was confronted by the fact that neither the Brazilian propaganda
oce nor RKO was comfortable addressing topics of racial and class diversity.30 The mere lming of subjects like the political agitation of the jangadeiros
and the contrast between upper- and lower-class Carnival was controversial.
On May 5, 1942, Pettey wrote to Drake that Welles was shooting a great deal
of carnival footage dealing with lower-class, black Brazilian life. Pettey worried that although the lm would make a great musical, he had to lie and
lie for the last two or three weeks to keep the local reporters away from the
studio . . . If they ever got in and saw some of the Rio shanty life we are doing they would write Orson out of town. So far we have had only one or two
bad stories.31 Pettey seemed to think Americans would enjoy the depiction
of Rios primitivism through voodoo and poverty, 32 but he feared Brazilian
media would resent the depiction of Brazil as exotic or impoverished.
The criticism surrounding the Rio project resembled the reactions to
Welless Voodoo Macbeth in that it came from two opposing sources:
traditional segregationists who were uncomfortable with any representation
of black life, and racially progressive Brazilians who feared that they would
be fetishized as exotics in an American travelogue. Reactions in the Brazilian media show people were unhappy that Welles was lming the poverty
of the favelas in particular. Both Dirio da Noite and Meio Dia complained
in articles published the same week that Welles was showing an unseemly
side of Brazilian life. Da Noite complains, The lming of the favelas was
not appreciated, while Meio Dias strong indictment of Welles criticizes his
representation of Carnival because only negroes appear.33 The latter article
goes so far as to suggest that Welles seek help from the Departamento de
Imprensa e Propaganda (DIP) to avoid a lm in which only black people
gure, as though Rio were another Harlem[.]34 A month later, after Jacars
death, Gatinha Angora complained even more aggressively in Cine Radio
Journal: They let him lm, to his delight, scenes of hills, no good half-breeds,
at sambas which are not always Brazilian, but full of music known all over
the world; [and the] lthy huts of the favelas which infest the lovely edge of
the Lake.35 As Benamou suggests, Its All True elevated subjects that from
a white North American point of view appear as profane to the level of the
sacred.36 But the subject of lower-class black life appeared to be equally
profane to a number of Brazilians as well. 37
Welles challenged the social and racial bias of both cultures by visually
elevating the impoverished black populace of Brazil, and his coverage of the
jangadeiros in particular challenged mainstream politics regarding class and
race. Welles incorporated heavily throughout the jangadeiros section the

R IS FOR REAL

Christ imagery of sh, cross, and sherman that are so familiar to Western
literature. 38 However, he also unintentionally exploited the very population that he purported to celebrate. The jangadeiros section of Its All True
became indicative of the diculties of the project in balancing an attempt
at ethnographic entertainment that would also educate the viewer, an early
form of infotainment now popularized by a variety of media outlets like the
History Channel. It also shows Welless inability to dislodge himself from the
position of privileged viewer, a shift that, had he made it, would have moved
his lm from the realm of exploitation to that of revolution.39
Jacar and the Tragedy of the Jangadeiros
The heart of Welless lm was the political confrontation between the four
jangadeiros (Manoel Olimpio Meira, Jernimo Andr de Souza, Raimundo
Correia Lima, and Manuel Pereira da Silva) who sailed into Rio de Janeiro to
confront President Vargas regarding greater civil rights. Unlike the Carnaval
sequence, the jangadeiros story had a concept for specic shot sequence
and would star the jangadeiros themselves, letting the most famous,
Jacar (a nickname given to Manoel Olimpio Meira) narrate his own story.
The story line outlines twelve scenes designed to introduce the dangerous
lives of these rural shermen to the American public. Sequence four was
to show a drowning, and sequences seven to eight the nding of the body
and funeral. The scene features Jacars mother, sister, and niece mourning
a ctitious character, whom Benamou interprets as becoming a metonymic
stand-in for Jacar following his death during the lming.40 Welles planned
to bridge the jangadeiros storyline and the Carnival storyline by restaging
the jangadeiros arrival in the Rio de Janeiro harbor as though it occurred
on the eve of Carnival rather than in the previous autumn. Undoubtedly,
the ctionalized version of the jangadeiros would have been romanticized in
Welless nished product, but it still held the potential to let poverty speak
for itself, a revolutionary concept for mainstream Hollywood.
Of the existing lm footage that remains, the jangadeiros shots are the
most beautiful sequences of the lm, with striking photography of the people
themselves and their oceanside lives at Cear (Figures 8 and 9). This part of
the lm was planned to feature Jacar, the most famous of the four jangadeiros, talking directly to the audience about his life and political beliefs.
The script depicts an articulate, persuasive man who does not romanticize
poverty as do many descriptions written by the Welles lm company41:
jacar: In my time I have wept. You might think, looking at my ugly
sunburned face, that that is not possible. But I know what it is to get
home and see the children hungry. We throw a few remains of sh

R IS FOR REAL

on the re, the wife fries them, and the tired body throws itself on
bed until dawn, when the jangada has to leave. If it rains, the roof
leaks and wets everything. It is misery. My man, to live like this is
not worthwhile.42
Welles was insulated from this type of poverty, even though he was very interested in representing it in his lm. During a preliminary visit to Fortaleza
March 811, 1942, Welles stayed at the Jangada Club, which his interpreter
Mathilde Kastrup described in her journal as swanky as any yacht club,
merely preserving the outward aspects of a rustic beach club.43 He participated in a staged sailing race on a log jangada raft and saw the jangadeiros
homes after dark, returning to the hotel to dictate details of the lm script.
Then, according to Kastrup, The DIP [the department of propaganda] crowd
took charge.44 The Welles visit was a staged event, supercially engaging the
poverty that surrounded him; he remained a tourist lming a traveloguea
goal he had explicitly rejected at the outset of the project. On the basis of his
limited view into the jangadeiros lives, Welles exclaimed,
I have never seen more colorful, adventurous people anywhere in
the world. To me these are truly Brazilian people. I love the way they
live and their happy, carefree approach to life. I think the jangadeiros
sequence will be the high spot of our lm[. . . .] The day before I got
there I was told that one of the jangadeiros had been killed while racing
his boat. The 45 minute race in which I took part resulted in a serious
injury to one of the jangadeiros in the very next craft.45
Unable to remove the lens of white privilege, Welles misreads the lives of
the jangadeiros and deciphers them as moving sceneryequivalent to the
parrots or monkeys he invokes in his later Hello Americans radio broadcast.
Their poverty is carefree; their injuries are an adventure, a good story. This
diminishment of the jangadeiros complexity and humanity didnt bode well
for their working conditions on his lm, and within three months Jacar
would die while reenacting his revolutionary protest sail to Rio.
The accounts of Jacars death vary,46 but it appears that on May 18 or 19,
1942, the jangadeiros were being towed to a beach to lm the reenactment of
their sailing trip to Rio. They were towed to the wrong beach, and as the lm
crew waved them toward the shore, a wave capsized their raft, throwing all
four men into the ocean. Jacar was the only one to drown. The reactions to
his death in the mainstream Brazilian media seem to see his loss as the tragic
result of collisions between ction and truth, capitalism and communal life,
North and South America.
Austregsilo de Athayde wrote in Dirio da Noite:

R IS FOR REAL

Jacar died at the edge of the beach, in an adventure without grandeur

[. . . .] Better had they [the jangadeiros] all stayed on their dunes in
their little carnaubastraw houses, without ever having seen the allures
of Babylon, without meeting the American movie people [. . .] without
knowing Orson Welles.47
A day later in Da Noite Berilo Neves wrote, It is a grave error to transplant
Reality to Fiction, legitimate heroism to the eeting legend. [. . .] The jangada
of the Northeastern caboclose does not t into the narrow environment of
the cinema lens.48 Most incisively, however, Correio da Manh published a
column honoring all those who have died working in the cinema, pointing
out that the majority of these are stunt men whom nobody knows. Jacar
was treated as another low-paid, expendable extra in the industry, and the
article rightly prophesizes that [t]he lm, however, incomplete, will not be
nished because Jacara true herohad no double to risk himself in the
dangerous parts of the lm.49
When Welles returned to Fortaleza for lming after Jacars death, he
made a greater attempt to connect with local culture and have an authentic
exchange with the community, in part because he had lost his RKO funding
but also because he strongly felt Jacars loss. 50 But still, as Benamou notes,
the social and cultural conicts surrounding the jangadeiros poverty were
swept from our view in the lmmaking process.51 The revolutionary concept
of this portion of the lm was undermined by the structure of the lming
itself, from the staged excursions into the jangadeiros community, to the pay
and working conditions of the jangadeiros. Ultimately, although Welles was
able to push the boundaries of cinematic tradition conceptually and thematically in the desire to represent Jacars perspective, he was operating within
a deeply hierarchical, capitalist commercial system that treated Jacar as a
relatively inexpensive commodity.
The Carnaval Sound: Possibilities and
Obstacles to Marketing Its All True
Like the jangadeiros section of the lm, the Carnaval sequence held innovative potential. It sought to develop the sense of aural pastiche and to
represent the sheer diversity of Brazilian samba music, but it nevertheless
lacked an overall Brazilian subjectivity. Despite Welless desire for authentic
representation and his eort to hire a team of Brazilian journalists and
intellectuals as research consultants, the production was still generated
within a conventional Hollywood production system.52 Welles was constantly
balancing his own interest in exploring taboo images of miscegenation, class
warfare, and carnivalesque rebellion with the publicly stated mission of his

R IS FOR REAL

project, to support Allied jingoism. Added to the inherently political conict

within his lm, there was also an aesthetic conict. In part because of his
interest in adapting literary texts for media performance, Welles had long
been interested in exploring the intersections between modernist literary
forms and the emerging forms of mass media narrative in radio and lm.
One hallmark of Wellesian media narrative is an ability of the performance
to call attention to the mechanisms of its own production, to demonstrate
a sense of self-awareness and critique often associated with a modernist aesthetic and rarely associated with the emerging classic Hollywood
cinematic narrative. As Miriam Bratu Hansen argues, Modernization
inevitably provokes the need for reexivity.53 When there is no attempt to
resolve the ambivalence at the heart of modernist critique, then art tends to
lean toward the pleasure in fragmentation and dissolution that is associated
with a postmodern aesthetic. Because of the unnished state of Its All True,
it evokes the postmodern pleasures of nonlinear narrative collage, denying
attempts to reconcile its contradictions or the multiple voices and images
within its narrative.
In her study of classic Hollywood and the modernist aesthetic, Hansen
outlines the traits commonly associated with the classic Hollywood lm and
suggests ways in which American lm systems are able to incorporate and
absorb evolutions in cinematic narrative. According to Hansen, Hollywood
lm has traditionally been associated with a sense of narrative unity that
masks process and fact of production, celebrating instead the psychology
of individual characters and formal harmony. 54 But she also suggests that
the emerging system of classic Hollywood cinema transcended these formal
expectations, exibly incorporating challenges to formal unity and harmony
as they emerged, embracing self-critique. She sees American classic cinema
as a regime of productivity and intelligibility that also functions as a
scaold, matrix, or web that allows for a wide range of aesthetic eects and
experience rather than a rigid universal system. 55 Welless experience with
RKO suggests that the Hollywood system did embrace experimentation,
conict, and disharmony but only to the extent that such experimentation
promised commercial and political viability.
The stakes were high for American cinema in this era, and the studios
were each trying to establish a coherent reputation for a certain narrative
style that would promise them a niche of the consumer market. This quest
for commercial viability drove studios to create unique cinematic languages
of image and sound that audiences would come to cravespecic genres,
directors, and stars that could be recirculated to consumers with reliable
protability. RKO had invested in Welles as a potential image of intelligent

R IS FOR REAL

experimentation with media entertainment. The cinematic language in Its

All True was experimental, to be based on image and sound, rather than
on written dialogue, but Welles still wanted this new language to be commercially appealing. As Hansen again suggests, whether we like it or not,
American movies of the classical period oered something like the rst
global vernacular.56 Welles wanted precisely to create this type of global
vernacular, a combination of sound and image that would transcend spoken
language and appeal to a polyglot Pan-American identity.
One central identier of the Wellesian narrative is its ability to incorporate
modern ambivalence and awareness of metanarrative within its structures,
whether on stage, screen, or radio. Even in his 1936 farce Horse Eats Hat,
Welles delighted in startling the audience by breaking the border between
stage and auditorium. He staged accidents in which his actors would fall
into or be exposed to the audience, perform spontaneous musical numbers during intermission or extend the stage action into the auditorium
to dismantle audience expectations of the division between performance
and reality. 57 In almost every Wellesian production, there are moments
designed to encourage audience disorientation, whether through the fake
news bulletins in War of the Worlds or the proposed direct-address prologue
to Heart of Darkness. Welles sought to disorient the audience once again in
his Rio project, announcing in a Mercury press release on May 5, 1942, that
the lm would be comprehensible to the eye and not necessarily the ear of
the audience.58 Specically intending to experiment with sound in his lm,
Welles wanted to use music to deconstruct the visual images. This aural focus
perhaps explains why, even after the failure of the lm, his Hello Americans
radio broadcast about Brazil captures many of the issues, themes, and even
narrative techniques that Welles articulated as goals for Its All True.
Jazz and samba. Welles intended to use music to evoke an emotional
response through correlative aural experience, and his concepts for the
Its All True soundtrack often connected samba with jazz. His shift from
African to Latin American topics moved him to the edge of a postmodern
aesthetic, still projecting tenets of modernism but also beginning to revel
in the disintegration of boundaries and binaries. Welles liked the rhythmic,
hybrid connotations of both samba and jazz, and after he decided to forgo
the African American jazz section of the Rio project, Welles transplanted
his ideas regarding jazz in the United States to samba in Rio. His choice to
focus on samba rather than the more bourgeois Brazilian carnival marches
reects his interest in the sambas association with the rhythmic batuques
and lundus and with a history linked to African slaves. The hills of samba
emerge as recurrent images in several drafts of both the lm and radio

R IS FOR REAL

scripts for the Rio projects. The radio version played a samba excerpt, and
then in all draft and broadcast versions, scripted Welles to deliver the line,
Dig that rhythm, you cats. Thats the Amazon and the Congo talking. For
Welles, samba represented the coming together of Africa and the Americas,
a polyglot music that represented his fascination with the primitive, but with
the potential for polyglot oneness rather than binary division.
Welles wanted samba music to represent the potential for Pan-American
unity, a shared language of music that would unite human experience across
boundaries of class, race, and language. He opens his Carnaval plot treatment
by exploring the relationship between samba and American jazz:
Our Carnaval picture opens in the hills, in this huge conservatory of
the samba[. . . .] Rios kinship to old New Orleans is pointed out. The
analogy is pursued, and we come to the conclusion that these cities are
closer than they seem on the map, that between American Jazz and
American Samba there is much in common.59
Both types of music were of interest to Welles in their spontaneity, their
unscripted ability to blend various traditions across lines of class and race,
and their public appeal. Thus samba served as the central metaphor for the
Rio section of Its All True. The lm was driven by sound as much as by its
visuals, and he planned to employ sound to out Hollywood expectations
for conventional narration. In his Carnaval plot treatment, Welles asserts,
Music, as I have said, is the basis of our picture.60
Amelia and Praa Onze. In both the lm project and the early concepts
for the radio version of Hello Americans, Welles incorporated two sambas
in particular: Saudades da Amlia and Adeus, Praa Onze. Both of these
sambas share a sense of nostalgia for the simplicity of premodern sensibilities and were carnival hits in 1942.61 The rst, sung to a woman who is not
Amelia, longs for the simplicity and poverty that the former girlfriend Amelia
represents. The singer accuses his current girlfriend of supercial materialism
and longs for the days when Amelia would willingly starve for him:

Electronic text rights unavailable. 62

Praa Onze strikes a similarly nostalgic note, but for the city itself. In
a draft script after Jacars death, Welles compares its tone to that of My

R IS FOR REAL

Old Kentucky Home.63 It laments the death of pre-Vargas Rio, since the
destruction of the Praa Onze, a traditional gathering place, was part of the
Vargas plan for modernizing the city64:
Im going to nish with Praa Onze
There will be no more Samba school, no more
Cry tamborim
Cry all the hill.65
Individual and cultural death reappear throughout both the radio and lm
versions of the Rio project, evoking the imperialist nostalgia of primitivism,
but with interplay and depth that was missing in his earlier primitivist projects. Its All True attempts to capture the voices of a culture that is increasingly threatened by modernization, aware of its own seduction into capitalism and urban development. Dudley Andrew notes that disintegration is
a key theme of the Wellesian brand, and that characters, knowledge, entire
ways of life are undermined and collapse over the course of his lms.66 But
this disintegration can also be seen as dissolution of the individual into the
collective, a symptom of political absorption that isnt necessarily negative
and can be revolutionary. As Benamou points out, Its All True returns the
individual to the state of collectivity in each segment.67 The jangadeiros
return home; Grande Othelo returns to the hills, taking samba with him at
the end of Carnival. In this way, the structure of the lm mimics its themes:
the lm oers a documentary exploration of a collective culture through
various individuals who are foregrounded temporarily (Jacar and Grande
Othelo,68 but also Welles himself). Self-exploration still appears as cultural
tourism, but the balance of this piece leans toward postmodern pleasures
in dissolution or disintegration, as well as in self-reection.
As the rushes for the lm returned from Rio to Hollywood, the studio
executives became concerned. The lm lacked any marks of the classic cinematic unitiesno lead actor, no written script, no character development.
The lm Welles sent back looked, even by his own account, like [t]housands
of feet of apparently repetitious material of people dancing and more people
dancing, thousands of feet of crowds and more crowds.69 Asked by RKO to
provide at least a plot treatment for Its All True, Welles reluctantly agreed
but attached a lengthy prologue to the script describing his aesthetic goals
for the picture. Welles emphasized three necessary aspects of his artistic
vision: (1) Samba music would act as the central language of the lm; (2) to
capture the spontaneity of Carnival, no script or recognizable stars should
be involved; (3) the model for his narrative would be a blend of journalism
and entertainment rather than ction.

R IS FOR REAL

The Wellesian voice. RKO could accept the rst of the three goals, but the
lack of stars and the lms experimental form would prove more problematic.
The samba sound could be sold to Hollywood; Welless further reluctance to
script his brand-name voice met with studio resistance. He told the studio in
his plot treatment, it hasnt been possible to approximate the actual wordage. 70 But Tom Pettey, soothing conventional Hollywood, promised to bind
the lush visual and musical images of Brazil within Welless narration, saying,
Over it all will be the Welles voice.71 He quotes Welles as explaining in a
lecture to the Rio cultural society that the lm would be four or ve stories
with me doing a lot of talking to make them hang together. 72
Catherine Benamou describes Welless conceptual shift in Its All True
as turning away from the model of a director toward that of a feigned deliberately nave collaborator.73 In particular, his voiceover would be used to
deceive the audience, as Pettey explained:
The Welles voice has been heard throughout the earlier parts of the
lm which has turned into what the audience suspects to be a travelogue. Suddenly, just as the audience tires, the voice fades out and the
cameras turn from the scenic beauties of Rio de Janeiro to a group of
pretty girls at Copacabana. 74
At this point, the camera would shift to the image of the jangadeiros coming
into the harbor, and the narrative would move from travelogue to revolutionary representation of the underclass.75 But this experimentation with the
use of Welles as narrator would have moved him from trusted authority to
trickster gure, setting his voice at odds with the documentary truth-telling form. Even though this type of fact/ction erosion is now a recognizable
hallmark of the Wellesian brand, experimentation with the famous Welles
voice, coupled with other experimental strategies, made this lm dicult
to sell to the studio.
If the unscripted ambiguity and dissonance made it harder to sell the lm
as a Welles vehicle, so did Welless plan to share the narration with Brazilian gures like Donna Maria, whom his plot treatment suggests would help
explain the samba lyrics. The self-reexivity present in earlier projects was
foregrounded in Its All True. Welless voice would be interrupted, challenged,
and generally reduced as a primary point of identication for the audience.
In one scene Welles is told by an interpreter that the Brazilians he is lming
say the camera is staring at them. As Benamou points out, this can be seen
as an exposition of the division of labor involved in shooting, and a violation
of a cardinal taboo in Hollywood practice. 76 It is also reminiscent of the
prologue to Heart of Darkness in which he forced the audience to experi

R IS FOR REAL

ence the position of caged canaries or electrocuted convicts. In both these

projects Welles highlighted the violence inherent within the act of lming,
of capturing the body on lm.
Similarly, Welles often used his voice to invoke the violence of narration.
As Phyllis Goldfarb describes Welless use of sound in narration, it calls
attention to itself, and reects on the medium that has promulgated that
convention. 77 Much like the experiments with dialogue he was using in his
radio series, Welles intended to present himself as participant rather than
an authority in his own lm. To capture the multiple styles and forums of
Carnival samba in his lm, he rejected coherent narrative in favor of ethnographic pastiche. He explained that the Carnaval sequence was to be entirely
unrelieved by story (or what is generally considered story) and yet above all,
it had to be entertainment. 78 With this nal sentence, Welles tries to balance
the aesthetic and the commercial. In the prologue to his plot treatment, he
repeatedly attempts to reinscribe his experimentation within familiar terms
for studio executives, but without apparent success.
There were other structural challenges to the studios marketing of the
lm as well. Just as Welles refused to use his own famous voice to position
himself as a star, he refused to use recognizable actors in the project:
no actors were brought to Rio, no big names were made available to
the picture, none of the usual cast of characters was present to build
around. Finding new people, thereforeBrazilian peopleand using
them eectively and correctly, was one of our biggest jobs. Yet we
always had to remember that this Carnaval part of the picture was
less about individuals, or musical numbers, or dances, than about
Carnaval itself.79
Although the lm would not use recognizable Hollywood stars,80 it
hoped to create new Brazilian stars. Welles promised that the musician
Grande Othelo would act as the central gure and image of the lm, leading
the viewer from scene to scene (Figure 10). In addition, he positioned Grande
Othelo as a potential Hollywood discovery:
Remember that name. It belongs to the performer himself and this
isnt the last time you will encounter it. This is only his rst American
picture, and hes a big hit in it for sure. Othello likes to be compared to
Mickey Rooney, but hes closer to a young Chaplin or Jimmy Savo.81
Welles used Grande Othelo as a counterargument for his lack of structure,
a familiar image to classic Hollywoodthe discovery of a potential big star.
Additionally, Welles promised that the introduction of samba itself would be

R IS FOR REAL

lucrative for RKO, that [a] movie about Samba couldnt be better timed[. . . .]
It adds up to this: R.K.O. controls the market on Samba.82 Welles balanced his
radical experimentation and politics with promises of traditional consumer
popularity to appease the increasingly nervous RKO executives.
Shooting a storm: Unstructured Carnival style. Welless second argument for the unstructured shooting schedule and style of Its All True was
that Carnival itself could be captured cinematically only through a strategy
of spontaneous lming coupled with dramatic reenactments of key scenes or
moments. Benamou describes his strategy as modeling the lm stylistically
and structurally upon the ritual of Carnaval itselfits theory and practice.83
Tying his unorthodox scripting style to the desire for ethnographic authenticity, Welles argued that his expensive habit of shooting many repetitive
reels of lm was necessary, since the problem of shooting Carnaval may be
compared to the problem of shooting a storm. We often had no choice but to
set up our camera and grind away until we got something useable.84 Again
rejecting the rigidity of a linear script, Welles argued, Our Carnaval lm
will have a script only after its completion in the cutting room. It must also
be explained that no story line exists or can existno important narrative
pattern involving personalities and human events.85 He emphasized that this
style had been accepted before he left for Rio, that It was understood by all
concerned before I left that carnaval would be shot on the cu.86
In this way, he equates the spontaneous scripting with the authenticity
needed to convey Carnival. The lack of Hollywood actors and script support
the journalistic, magazine feature goal of his lming. This is not to say, however,
that Its All True was journalistic reportage. The truth Welles was interested
in was clearly manufactured, a trait made much more obvious in the eventual
Hello Americans broadcast where Welles responds to a ctitious listener who
asks if hes broadcasting from Brazil, by short wave by saying, Nodramatic
license. . . . This broadcast comes to you by dramatic license, from the rst
place you think of when you think of Brazil . . . from Rio de Janeiro.87
Welles sought to create a brand of documentary ction that probed the
concept of truth, and he freely admitted that many scenes of Carnival were
reshot and reenacted. He suered no illusions of art separate from politics
or commercial viability, admitting, we knew almost at once that it would
be necessary to restage many episodes and customs of Carnaval[. . . . T]he
Department of Press and Propaganda oered to see that anything we might
want to restage would be put together again at any time convenient.88 There
is inherent ambivalence in Welless goals to record accurately and yet to create
entertaining scenes, and Its All True openly treads the boundary between
fact and ction, critiquing itself even in its creation.

R IS FOR REAL

This model of ctitious, ambivalent reporting was not new to Welless

lmmaking, nor was it new to the American modernist narrative. Welless
narrative position in Its All True mimics that of the reporter Thompson in
Citizen Kane. As Robert Carringer notes, Welles is an evidence gatherer
whose search for authority, like that of Thompson and Nick Carraway in The
Great Gatsby, is undermined by the very process of searching.89 These newsgathering narrators become less condent of their missions as they learn
more of their subjects, according to Carringer.90 As in Heart of Darkness, the
ultimate object of the modernist quest is unknowable, elusive, and perhaps
even dangerously alluring and self-destructive. Welles positioned himself
at the nexus of the unknowable exotic in Its All True, eschewing a ctitious
character in favor of himself as narrator but also submerging his individual
role into a polyglot Pan-American collective. This proves a dangerous strategy in classic Hollywood lmmaking, which prefers an identiable director
or star to draw in viewers at the box oce. It also proves the malleability of
the classic Hollywood narrative, however, in that as David Boardwell and
Kristin Thompson suggest, the system can adapt and absorb deviations in its
traditions, regulating what may violate it.91 Ultimately, this exibility allows
Hollywood cinema to absorb idiosyncratic auteurs like Orson Welles. 92
Welles was working to build a new type of classic cinema language, one that
would challenge familiar cinematic tropes while still incorporating aspects
of traditional Hollywood. In his journal of the Rio experience, Tom Pettey
quotes Welless ambition:
Im going to do something that has never been done before and probably
never will be repeated. Im making a picture that is neither a travelogue,
a documentary lm, a boy meets girl romance nor a gloried newsreel.
Its going to be a new medium of entertainment[.]93
But of course even this quote was circumscribed within the Hollywood
production method; Petteys journals were sent to Mercury publicist Herb
Drake and to columnists Hedda Hopper and Erskine Johnson, among others. However revolutionary the concept of narrative for the Rio project,
it was taking place within the Hollywood studio system for political and
commercial purposes. In this way, the project is more revolutionary in its
unnished state.94
The Carnival footage that remains from Its All True juxtaposes the various classes and locales of the samba balls, moving between private clubs and
public squares. The styles of samba are also contrasted: big bands versus local
sambas from the hills.95 Thus the Carnaval segment as it remains can be seen
as a site of reconciliation of national, regional, class, and racial dierence. 96

R IS FOR REAL

This assessment would probably not be possible, however, if the lm had been
edited for nal commercial release. Two bodies of evidence seem to suggest
that a nished studio version of the lm would have circumscribed its oppositional, diverse images within linear, commercial nality: notes regarding
the economic and political trajectory of the lm, and the production process
that resulted in the nal script for the Hello Americans Rio broadcast.
Playing with a Purpose: Art and Propaganda in Brazil
The prewar politics that spawned Its All True were fundamentally at odds
with the prewar economics that motivated RKO. Benamou summarizes the
irreconcilable tension between the diplomatic and cinematic missions for Its
All True by saying, [T]he war formed both a precondition for the development of the Latin American project [. . .] and a pretext which RKO executives
considered using for discontinuing the shooting in Brazil.97 Welles, as diplomat, was supposed to bridge North and South American cultural dierences.
Welles as director was supposed to market these dierences to an American
audience. This created ssures in studio-government collaboration at the
material levels of production and distribution. 98 In other words, the two
entities that encouraged Welles to embark on the Brazilian project had
fundamentally opposing goals. Although the project was initially conceived
to address the overlapping needs of the government and RKO, increasingly
Welles was perceived by the studio as elevating his role as goodwill ambassador over his role as director of a marketable Hollywood lm.99
Welless appointment by Nelson Rockefeller as a goodwill ambassador
refocused the lm project on the question of why North Americans should
be interested in and (nancially) invested in South America.100 The Oce of
the Coordinator of Inter-American Aairs (CIAA),101 Motion Picture Division, created in October 1940, suggested that projects like Welless would
further the national defense and strengthen the bonds between the nations
of the Western Hemisphere and invested more than 20 million in feature
pictures.102 The CIAA invested signicantly in Welles, even agreeing to insure
the producer against loss up to 30 per cent of the total production cost, but
not to exceed 300,000. Schaefer invoked this subsidy to reassure investors
that the project was worthwhile.103 In this way, Welless mission was primarily political, and the local media reports of his arrival oer a picture of him
being met by more politicians than fans, with none of the screaming girls
who greeted Tyrone Power on a similar trip (Figure 11).104
In addition, the Mercury publicists worked hard to position Welles as
an authentic member of the Brazilian community rather than just another
exploitative tourist from the North. When Welles arrived in February, he

R IS FOR REAL

told the media that he was almost born in Rio, and downplayed his eorts
to avoid the draft by saying, In the rst place my number has not come
up. . . . And in the second place, even if I did want to serve as I did want to
voluntarily, I would not be accepted because of my health exam[. . . . T]he
work I am doing here is much more important than keeping guard over
highways105 Petteys April 2, 1942, correspondence describes Welles as one
of the citys most impressive landmarks and promotes the story that Welles
was drawn to Rio because his parents honeymooned there: So, said Orson,
I was conceived in Brazil. I must go there and make a motion picture among
my people.106 Thus Welles and his publicity men tried to position him diplomatically as both patriotic and personally loyal to Brazilthe embodiment
of a Pan-American identity.
But the proposed propaganda function of the lm was fundamentally at
odds with its concept as an authentic examination of Brazilian life, since
the presentation of the Vargas regime as a desirable partner of the United
States required democratic whitewashing.107 Welless radio broadcasts
from Brazil at the time supported his diplomatic propaganda function, and
even the jangadeiros section of the lm could be interpreted as supporting
a positive image of the Vargas regime, since it provided an example of the
regimes positive achievements in the direction of democracy.108 Welles was
perceived as more successful in his diplomatic mission than his cinematic
project, and the CIAA commented as late as April 1942 that Mr. Welles
presence in Brazil has had a most satisfactory eect, both with the public
and with the Brazilian Government.109
On the governments side, the CIAA had two goals: to bring rural communities into contact with urban communities and to disseminate pro-Ally
information.110 The lectures that Welles delivered to the Rio cultural society
and other entities during his stay in Brazil were seen as part of the latter
half of this diplomatic mission, as were his radio broadcasts from Brazil.
The jangadeiros tale t the former need, oering a visual image of the rural
meeting the urban as they sailed into the Rio harbor, and giving the sense
that Brazil was moving toward democracy and modernization, two concepts
designed to appeal to mainstream American audiences. The death of Jacar
complicated this mission for Welles, and although he stayed in Brazil as a
goodwill ambassador until August 1942, both the lm project and his diplomatic eectiveness waned with the drowning of Jacar.
Even before Jacars death, however, RKO wanted to pull the plug on
Welless project due to budgetary concerns and the sense that he was running
amok without studio supervision.111 Benamou attributes part of the budgetary concern to RKOs own nancial crisis in 1941 and 1942, forcing them to

R IS FOR REAL

move from high quality, artistic features [. . .] to low budget, crowd-pleasing

series like the Tarzan lms.112 Welles had been hired under the assumption
that he would be a prestige director, not a crowd pleaser, and this shift made
his Wellesian brand an increasingly bad match with RKO. The budget crisis
made the studio assert more creative control over all their directors, not just
Welles, but their increasing desire to intrude on his always independent creative process put their goals for the Brazilian project squarely and irrevocably
at odds with his. Benamou interprets the CIAA as being more pleased than
RKO with Welles because RKO wanted to quantify Welless work product
in terms of hours, money spent, and potential for prot, whereas the CIAA
preferred to think of his diplomatic mission in the context of increased communication between the cultures.113 Therefore, activities that seemed wasteful
to RKOlike simply mingling sociallywere seen as positive to the CIAA.
The liberal, unstructured concept for Its All True could not have been tried
at a worse time for RKO. Welless unscripted lming technique resulted in
66,134 feet of Technicolor footage and (only about a quarter of it from actual
Carnival, the rest of it staged) and 19,414 feet of black-and-white footage by
May 4, 1942.114 While certainly they were saving money on acting salaries by
hiring locals, not stars (Jess Vsquez Plata,115 the child actor in the Bonito
section was to be paid sixteen dollars a week), they were also hiring casts of
chorus girls and crowds of extras to reenact Carnival. Welless total expenses
by June 29, 1942, were 678,185. In particular, he paid the Urca casino a large
amount to stage Carnival sequences and tended to spend anywhere from a
thousand to fourteen thousand dollars a day. Welless grandiose plans were
often scaled back by RKO, including his plan to live with the jangadeiros in
Fortaleza for several weeks.116 Communication back to RKO was expensive
as well, and UP correspondent Frederick Othman describes Welles working
from his headquarters at the Casino de Urca, where four jazz bands play
constantly and chatting with the boys here at RKO via telephone at 6 a
minuteand if you dont think the facts in this dispatch cost a pretty penny,
then youre not an RKO stockholder.117
Welless Mercury public relations team strove to reassure RKO and the
public that Welles was a serious diplomat and creative genius rather than a
North American playboy on a proigate spending spree. Editorial changes to
Petteys March 31 missive reect a desire to downplay Welless reputation as
a child-genius who is out of control in favor of building a more responsible
image of him and suggesting that the lming delays were due to a cultural
slow pace rather than to his own disorganization.
One of the most charming things about Rio de Janeiro is that it is
the sort of place that makes Orson Welles seem normal. In fact there

R IS FOR REAL

are times when it makes Welles appear very adult positively business
like[. . . .] He has been in Rio more than ten weeks and is just getting
started in production. The Cariocans feel that he is hurrying things a
bit, but shrug and say, he is not as eccentric as most North American
businessmen who want to do everything in a week.118
Petteys public relations placement worked, and was picked up by Othman,
who wrote that Rio is the one place which makes the mighty Orson seem
normal. There are times when the city even makes him appear adult and
business-like.119
Nevertheless, the childlike playboy image was still an integral part of
the Wellesian brand, the id to his genius-businessman ego. Pettey describes
him on April 2 as a
boy named Orson who was in a new country populated by happy, carefree people who liked to play. Orson the indefatigable worker, became
Orson the untiring playboy[. . . . T]hen one night he went to work and
presently discovered he had been playing for a purpose. In those two
weeks he had worked out the plot for his picture, learned the habits and
customs of the people and had gathered enough material for movies,
radio shows and a book.120
In this passage, Pettey manages to align Welless inner child with the primitive childlike Brazilians, evoking the binary associations that the project
purportedly attempted to transcend. Trying to bridge the gap between his
diplomatic and cinematic missions, Welles promised, When I tie the stories
together with my commentary the people of all the Americas will know at
least something of the habits and customs of their neighbors. They are going
to be entertained, too.121 This oxymoronic desire to sample Brazilian culture
from the position of diplomatic insulation without falling into the traditional
studio paradigm of shooting travelogue proved impossible to achieve. Ultimately, it seems likely that Gatinha Angoras concerns were realized:
Each time the robust and handsome anc of del Rio points his
cameras to so-called picturesque spots of the city, we feel a slight
sensation of uneasiness, perhaps, like a vague warning of the evil
which will come later[. . . .] Yes, because experience has unfortunately
already taught us the point reached by the thirst for curiosity of these
American technicians who visits us [. . .] lots of talk, lots of praise for
our land, our people, our customs, and then, when we have occasion
to see on the screen a lm on a South American subject, we have that
disaster which we all know.122

R IS FOR REAL

The Brazilian people were not allowed to escape the violence of the colonial
lens, even though the fragmented narrative structure of the unnished lm
oers glimpses and aural fragments of Brazilian life, the nished product
would very likely have had to capitulate to RKOs commercial concerns. To
become a viable market commodity, Its All True would have been reeled in,
literally, in the editing room.
Hello, Americans! The Radio Rio Project
Of course, it is very hard to argue for what might have been, but the best
evidence of how the editorial process tended to erase the revolutionary
content of Welless work, along with portions of its revolutionary structure,
is the evolution from draft to nal copy of the radio version of the Rio project, broadcast on November 15, 1942, after Welless return from Brazil. The
radio broadcast was drafted and revised during Welless time in Brazil, with
an early draft script dated March 1942. Catherine Benamou calls the Hello
Americans radio shows the most direct forms of appropriation by Welles
of Its All True material.123
Many of the same tensions reside within the Hello Americans radio
broadcast as within the lm, and several elements remain intact through
all copies of the draft into the broadcast version. For example, the radio
broadcast retains Welless vision of samba music as the central language
of the performance, as well as the use of a multivocal blend of journalism
and entertainment. It also treads the line between documentary and ction,
invoking the type of genre blending familiarized in March of Time and other
historical-ctional blends of the era. However, as the script was revised for
broadcast, it also eliminated several of the revolutionary structural and
thematic components that Welles originally intended to be central to his
lm. It turned away from attempts to capture the unique voices and multiple
perspectives of ordinary Brazilian citizens, instead using voices and perspectives that were familiar to Americans. The broadcast version represented
the Brazilian voice through the singing of Carmen Miranda, capitulating to
the commercial desire to sell a hot commodity through a known star and
propagating the exact exoticism that the Brazilian media had feared.
An early draft for the script dated March 6, 1942, reects Welless original
ambition to include a polyvocal critique of the Northern perspective on Brazil.
The script opens with Welless voice introducing the samba. In an attempt to
address the concerns of the Brazilians who saw samba as an undesirable public
representation of Rio de Janeiro, Welles promised that samba would show
another side to Rio. Not a seamy sidenot at all, even if chic isnt the
word for it. No, indeed, if Rios back yard isnt exactly gala, its even

R IS FOR REAL

gayer than Rios front lawn. There isnt a jazz-smith up North who could
ever express it. Its set to music but the musics all its ownrich, deep,
Brazilian. It comes rolling down to Rio from the hills, it throbs in the
streets, everybody dances to itits called samba.124
Undermining the univocality of his narration, he is interrupted repeatedly by Brazilian voices labeled simply 1st voice and 2nd voice. These two
voices challenge oversimplications that Welles asserts about the cultural life
of Brazil and reect the multiple perspectives on Brazilian life that Welless
research team had collected and translated from local media. Specically,
the voices argue over the origins of samba, whether it was born in the hills
or the city. One voice focuses on the popular conception of samba as born
from the folk tradition of the hills, while the other sees the hills as a place
that marginalized urban groups temporarily escaped to when necessary: It
is this way, Sr. Welles: as the Police were distressed with the noises made
by musicians in the city late at night, they arrested them without pity. This
is why they took refuge in the hills where Police could not reach them. The
Samba belongs to the city, to all Rio.125 In later versions of the script, however,
the conversations with these dissenting, authentic voices are cut, so that
Welles controls the narration. As narrator, he periodically enters into brief
dialogues with other gures who present American consumers with commercial products from BrazilCarmen Miranda, architecture, parrots.
The script retains the central concepts of Its All True. For example, it
emphasizes the parallels between samba and jazz. However, the broadcast
eliminated the complexity of dissent within Brazilian culture and the conicting interpretations of samba within that culture. Even in this draft script,
the section of the dissenting voices is marked out, creating a cut from the
line Thats the Amazon and the Congo talking to Welles saying Id like
to remark that Samba, like some wines, doesnt seem to travel very well. 126
The revised version waters down the Brazilian cultural debate over samba
even more and presents samba simply as a potential export for Americans
who like jazz and other exotic pleasures. An insert to the draft presents
the American voices of a mother and her two children, Junior and Girl,
who talk about all the delightful things you can buy at the festivities surrounding Carnival.
girl: They have so many beautiful costumes, for a long time I couldnt
make up my mind whether to go as a gypsy girl, a Hindu, an Hawaiian, or Minnie Mouse. We nally decided, thoughmother and I
both went as Baianas. Theyre all the rage.
jr: Baianas are natives of Bahia.127

R IS FOR REAL

The children educate the American consumer regarding what exports to

buy from Brazilwhat will be all the rage in terms of exotic accessories
from South Americaand evoke familiar North American images, Mickey
Mouse and gypsies. Following the exact pattern of the proposal for Its All
True, Welles goes on to introduce samba music, discussing with a voice labeled Linda the lyrics to Amelia and Praa Onza, the same two sambas
represented in the lm version. But then Welles is interrupted once again by
a voice labeled Brazilian.
Brazilian: Sr. Welles, excuse me, but Id like to raise an objection.
Welles: Certainly, Sr.
Braz: Is it not possible you give too much emphasis to our Carnival?
Welles: How can your Carnival be over-emphasized? [. . .]
Braz: Now dont you think it would be wrong for you to give your
country the impression that our country does nothing but laugh
and sing?
Welles: [. . .] if we learn your songs, well get to know you better. Music
doesnt need to be translated. As for laughterId like my people
to hear your people laughing. Its a very beautiful sound. Laughter
isnt what youd call a luxury. Just now its a necessity. Dont worry:
Ill tell about your schools and factories and your magnicent new
citiesthis isnt just one broadcast; this is part of a whole series.
But, Sr., laughter is the rst attribute of civilization and I want my
countrymen to know how civilized you are . . .128
Welles uses the Brazilian dissent to silence it, but it is still represented in
this early draft. Later drafts exchange the Brazilian voices for more American voices, which share impressions of Brazil from the point of view of the
privileged tourist, there to consume products and return home, rather than
attempting to represent any of the conicts inherent in simplifying a culture
down to a one-hour entertainment broadcast.
The broadcast version of Brazil focuses on two themes comforting to the
American listener in a wartime era: democracy and modernization. It keeps
an opening from an earlier draft in which Welless monologue is interrupted
by a jingoistic American, saying,
I love my country without you telling me to, and so does everybody
else. Okay? . . . What do you mean by saying the show youre doing
is only for Americans who talks [sic] English. Everybody in America
talks English.
Welles: Ive got you there. I was just saying its easy to forget how much

R IS FOR REAL

America means when you got on the phone. You say we all love our
country, and of course thats true. But do we all love America? Do
you realize what America means? (Music: Sneaks In)129
Welles then patiently guides the listener in an aural equivalent of drawing back a camera into a long shot of the Americas, moving out from our
neighborhood to our state to our new nation to Americatwo continentsOne continent with a canal. Our half of the Globe, Our portion of the
earth. The new world.130 This version retains the concept of the interrupted
narrative but uses it to reassure the skeptical American audience rather than
to represent the complexity of the Brazilian subject. It also introduces Carmen Miranda to the script as the voice of Brazil, a change that was retained
in the broadcast version. The marketing vision for RKOs cinema project and
the CBS radio broadcast were similarly dependent on using big-name stars
and familiar commodity images to hook audiences. Both forums accepted
experimentation only to the extent it didnt disrupt the commercial potential
of the broadcast or its wartime propaganda function.
To emphasize the themes of democracy and modernization, the broadcast
script introduced several American voices identied by their occupations
architect, businessman, writer, etc. These roles are kept in the nal November
15, 1942, broadcast, which opens with the skeptical American followed by a
dialogue with Carmen Miranda in which she introduces the audience to the
exotic instruments used for samba, emphasizing their African origin and
their use of catskin.131 Then Welles shifts to a marketing campaign for Brazil
as a potential investment for North Americans:
Welles: . . . Brazil is a big countrya very big country. . . . Theres a
lot to likeand a lot to tell: theres history and legend and romance.
Most people dont care very much for statistics. It depends on what
interests you. For instance, if youre a businessman
Businessman: Thats what I ama businessman. Ill tell you something
about Brazil: This country is three million square miles of the biggest wealth potential on Gods green earth. . . .132
This version emphasizes Brazils modernization and economic potential,
moving from Businessman to a mining engineer who talks about gold and
diamondsbig ones too.133 He is particularly interested in manganese for
steel. The character Explorer argues with Sociologist about the demise
of the jungle as it is consumed for construction and the advancement of
civilization. An architect and his wife are focused on how to bring Brazilian
goods home with them:

R IS FOR REAL

Architect: My wife wants to take at least two dozen parrots back

home with us. Me, Im an architect, and Id prefer some of the Baroque Colonial buildings Ive seen . . .134
Welles: Thats quite a problem, moving large buildings from one
country to another. I think its been done, tho. . . .135
The most heavily edited dialogue between the draft and nal versions are
the lines of a character titled Writer. In the draft script, he says he likes the
Skyscrapers and voodoo136 of Brazil, but in the broadcast version, jungles
is handwritten in over voodoo. The images of primitivist modernism are
replaced with the commodities and resources that are valuable to the wartime eorttechnology, minerals, energy. In both the draft and nal copies,
Writer is drawn to the interracial identity of Brazilians, but only a hint of
this aspect of Brazilian life makes it into the broadcast version. Several lines
about intermarriage and mixed racial identity are cut, but the nal script
keeps the writers assertion that Portugals the melting pot of Europe, and
that therefore a drop of real Brazilian blood is an honest to goodness drop
of all mankinds blood.137
In typical Wellesian self-reection, the broadcast concludes with Welles
ruminating about the committee of blind men who investigated the elephant. Each describes just the portion of the body he can touch, and
therefore all are wrong:
Welles: . . . Each expert had a dierent version of the truthdepending on which section of the elephants anatomy he happened to
grab. Now, I dont pretend to be able to see any better or any more
than anybody else who might try to describe these countries, but
I promise I wont concentrate solely on the trunk or the tail or the
tusksor natural resources or Indian war dances or butteries or
Big Business. Its not easy, but I am going to try to outline enough
so you can ll in enough to get some notion of what the other half
of America really looks like.138
This would have been an ambitious goal for the broadcast series, to return
to the serialization format he had perfected on radio during 1938, but to use
serialization to build intercultural understanding.139 The structure of this
broadcast mimics aurally many of the visual goals of the unnished Its All
True in terms of employing a polyvocal, documentary ction format, as well
as incorporating themes of Pan-American identity, antifascism, prodemocracy and racially progressive politics. But as the editorial process for this
broadcast shows, much of the revolutionary power of the lm would have
been lost as it moved through the editorial and distribution process.

R IS FOR REAL

Welles might try to reassure us, as he did the Brazilian skeptic in the
March 6 draft script, Dont worry: Ill tell about your schools and factories
and your magnicent new cities[. . .] I want my countrymen to know how
civilized you are . . .140 But why not let the Brazilians decide what aspects of
the culture they would prefer to equate with civilization?
Mainly because industry publicists thought they could sell images of
the laughing, happy simplicity of Brazilian life. Pettey had tried to tap into
this image in his March 31 entry in his Rio project journals, which tried to
resituate the negative press about Welless high-prole speeding and partying in Brazil by saying, If Welles goes tearing about town in a high speed
automobile as he does on shooting days, the natives leap out of the way of
the fenders and laugh. They are accustomed to leaping and laughing.141
Pettey depicts Welles as the life of a party that all of Rio is attending: it
was really Orsons carnival. Before he arrived in Rio there had been little
enthusiasm of the pre-Lenten festival. It was wartime, the people were not
interested in celebrations.142 Pettey attempted to resituate the communal
event of Carnival into a rst-person-singular Wellesian event, and this type
of consolidation of cultural experience into the Wellesian brand was far
from a radical act.
Welless interaction with the Brazilian community seems ambivalent, at
times making connections but also alienating many people. Not only did
resistance to his presence in Rio appear in the local papers with increasing
frequency during his stay, but he also began to have problems with his own
crew. Pettey reported on May 5, just days before Jacars death, that Welles
was getting harassment from the RKO home oce. He complains, Welles
is quite dicult[. . . .] He has had so much publicity he feels that he can push
any of the newspapermenBrazilian or Americanaround and that he is
above criticism. Hell nd out.143 This ominous warning would be fullled
just days later, after Jacars drowning, when Welless support from the
press, the government, and RKO disappeared. Sadly, this letter from Pettey
indicates how futile Jacars death may have been. He says, It looks like we
have spent a lot of time on the Jangadeiros for no purpose as I hear by the
grapevine that the studio has called o that part of the lm.144 The grapevine
apparently had not given Welles the same message, and the lming continued
on May 18, resulting in Jacars death.
The failure of Its All True could be best summed up by a Brazilian voice:
that of Enas Viany, who wrote a piece in spring 1942 titled They Think It Is
but It Is Not. Viany argues that the North American perception of Brazil is
that we speak Spanish and can only dance samba. But he argues that Brazilians are equally at fault for this misperception, since he has colleagues who

R IS FOR REAL

place the name of Carmen Miranda on the same level as [pianist] Guiomar
Novais, [sociologist] Gilbert Freyre or [opera singer] Bidu Sayao.145
In a sense, Welles is correct in his assertion in the prologue to the Carnaval plot treatment: It cost a lot of money for us to come down here[. . . .]
The only way that cost could be justied was for us to make here a picture
and not a travelogue, to make a Carnaval Sequence which would dene, in
itself, the dierence between a documentary and a feature story[. . . .] The
time and the money havent been wasted.146 Precisely because Its All True
remains unnished, and because its production is so well documented by
Welless own crew, the media, and the governments of both countries, this
project left behind a wealth of information on the attempted formation of
transnational identity, the commercial exploitation of South America by
North America, and the patterns of narrative experimentation in both radio and cinema at midcentury. Had the lm been nished, probably much
of its complexity would have been erased in an eort to create a seamless
commercial product.
One of the draft scripts for Its All True seems keenly aware of the tensions
within the process of the projects development and touches directly on several of the issues that would ultimately sink the project. In this draft script,
undated but written before Jacars death, Shifra, the script girl (based on
Shifra Haran, Welless assistant), introduces the jangadeiros story to Welles
when he complains that they need more stories of real people or theyll never
nish the picture. After calling him a fat wreck, Shifra gives him a sheaf
of papers that she has had translated to English from Portuguese. She tells
him of the jangadeiros trip to Rio and says of the papers, That was written
by Jacar. Hes their leader. I tell you seriously, Orson, hes one of the great
men of the world.147 Welles, moving seamlessly from being the rst-person
singular to representing it, reads the words, My name is Jacar. I was born
on the beach at Iracema in the province of Cear As he continues we FADE
OUT.148 Welless rst-person singular here merges into Jacars identity, tying together the two personas at the center of the lm, foreshadowing how
closely the fate of the project would be tied to Jacar.
In addition, this version moves from the jangadeiros to Carnival by using President Vargas as the transitional gure. In the transitional scene,
introduced by samba music, Welles visits with President Vargas in his oce,
and they talk about the jangadeiros. The ending resonates with the pasts
haunting blindness to the future. Vargas says he wishes Welles could have
met the jangadeiros when they were in his oce and comments reassuringly, As you know their story has a happy ending.149 Sadly, nothing could
be further from the truth.

R IS FOR REAL

Its All True oered an ending for Welles and RKO as well, but not a happy
one. By the time of this nal RKO project, Welles had moved away from
the Mercury Theatre classic adaptation strategies and had begun to explore
the boundaries between truth and ction, when combined with the rstperson singular. The resulting entertainment forms were too progressive
for mainstream Hollywood to accept as commercially viable. Increasingly,
Welles would move from Hollywood insider to exile, eventually removing
to Europe and taking on increasingly Quixotic projects. This shift from the
role of American propagandist to expatriate critic (and occasional Hollywood
heretic) gave Welles his lasting legacy. Although his years at RKO produced
more unnished than nally edited and marketed projects, his complexity
of vision and desire for experimentation with the blurry line between fact and
ction would become the true legacy of the Wellesian brand, and would have
enduring eects on mass media entertainment. We see his legacy today in
the confessional booths of reality television, the laughing audience of fake
news shows, and the proliferation of fragmentary texts on Internet sites like
YouTube. The twenty-rst century is truly an era of Wellesian pleasuresnot
the elite pleasures of auteur cinema but the mass media pleasures of fakery
and fraudulence, and of self-referential images that encourage the audience
to unravel these forgeries and delight in their revelation.

0UcTaf^aS
Wellesian LegaciesWhat, If Anything,
Do Mel Gibson, Stephen Colbert, and
Steven Spielberg Have in Common?
The Wellesian brand has helped establish at least two images that resonate in
contemporary American media culture: the star director and the concept of
truthiness. This nal section examines twenty-rst-century manifestations
of these themes that intrigued Welles in the earliest stages of his career, and
suggests why they retained such cultural relevance. When we compare these
two entertainment legacies, the Wellesian concept of truthiness appears to
have had an even greater impact on American culture than does the advent
of the star director.1
The rst part of this chapter examines the legacy of directorial branding, using two contemporary director-driven lms that initially recall early
Wellesian projects. The rst movie, Mel Gibsons The Passion of the Christ
(2004), shared many of the ambitions and obstacles of Welless own proposed
Christ project but ultimately circumvented mainstream studio barriers to
become a huge economic success. The second project, Steven Spielbergs
adaptation of War of the Worlds (2005), shared many strategies with Welless
famous adaptation but had a much less immediate impact on its audience
than did the 1938 radio broadcast, despite being a box-oce hit. Controversy
helped fuel the success of both these projects, although the controversy
surrounding Gibsons Passion of the Christ can be understood as emerging
from a post-Holocaust perspective, while Spielbergs adaptation of War of
the Worlds can be attributed to its post-9/11 context.
Over the course of the twentieth century, the Christ project became a
type of American cultural touchstone through which budding star directors
(in the case of Mel Gibson, a star actor already) could establish themselves.

AFTERWORD

Directors ranging from Cecil B. DeMille to Martin Scorsese took on the challenge of adapting a Christ narrative, with varying degrees of commercial and
artistic success. Much like the Holocaust lm, the Christ narrative addresses
a topic of historic and spiritual importance in an attempt to assert artistic
control over archetypal narrative. The assumption is that if the male director
(for mastering the master narrative seems to be a primarily masculine preoccupation) can assert creative control over such a culturally central narrative,
then he has achieved technical, commercial, and artistic excellence. In this
way, the Christ narrative represents an artistic opportunity for the auteur
and a commercial opportunity for the star director. The director highlights
his individual interpretation and domination of a culturally collaborative
narrative, and if successful, he is rewarded with an increase in lmmaking
reputation and commercial status. In Gibsons case, Passion of the Christ was
a huge success, eventually grossing more than 600 million worldwide.
Although one of the reasons Welles abandoned his Christ project was
religious controversy, this same controversy was one of the major reasons
for the success of The Passion. Gibson chose to center his Christ project in
the contentious tradition of the passion play, 2 and images of Christs suering were cited as a main reason for the box-oce draw of the lm in terms
of their realism. However, these images also proved highly disturbing to
a broad cross-section of the audience. Ultimately, The Passion appears to
have been a short-term success for Gibson, since he has been unable to build
on its popularity. 3 Thus despite the fact that Gibson brought to fruition a
lm project Welles was only able to conceive, he has failed at this point to
establish himself as a directorial brand.
In contrast to Gibson, Spielberg has successfully established himself as a
market brand, capable of promoting his lms through the association with
his own name. He is perhaps the most powerful director of his era, able to
green-light projects that are associated with his name even as a producer.
Though Spielberg is unarguably a star director, critics still debate his entitlement to auteur status based on artistic merit. Spielbergs artistry has
a distinctly commercial bent, and as Warren Buckland notes, Spielbergs
brand image is closely linked to his internal auteur status [. . .] .4 By rst
forming Amblin Entertainment and later DreamWorks, Spielberg also created a marketing structure for lms that were associated with but not by
him. Both companies were closely linked to Spielberg himself through their
logosmuch as Welless work was always clearly identied by his voice. The
Amblin logo directly invoked Spielbergs signature lm, E.T, and as Buckland
observes, the later DreamWorks logo incorporated the moon imagery of
Amblin to convey an idyllic, idealistic, sentimental Norman Rockwelltype

AFTERWORD

image of Americaanother universal image of lost childhood experience.5

Amblin and DreamWorks acted as mechanisms to present Spielbergs vision
of cinema and successfully extended his brand to incorporate the work of
others. DreamWorks espoused goals similar to that of George Schaefer and
RKO in Welless era in that both studios wanted to promote prestige directors. DreamWorks saw itself as a space for creative lmmaking driven by
personality and talent, particularly for directors who have their own vision
and imagination, and do not require constant guidance.6 Thus DreamWorks
was able to attract directors such as Robert Zemeckis, Ridley Scott, Woody
Allen, and Sam Mendes. 7 Spielberg emerges as an auteurs nancier, a director who has moved into the realm of producing other directors works and
who is able to imbue the work of others with his own directorial brand.
If Gibson inherited Welless penchant for controversy, Spielberg inherited
his gift for visual magic. Spielbergs personal brand of lmmaking emphasizes spectacle, which is often equated with the magic of cinema. Buckland describes Spielberg in language reminiscent of those who emphasize
Welles-as-magician. Spielberg is the conjurer who has mastered the art of
entertaining via technical virtuosity.8 Accordingly, Spielbergs adaptation
of War of the Worlds diverges from the Wellesian approach in its focus on
spectacle over suspense, partly due to the medium in which it is expressed,
lm rather than radio. While Spielbergs War of the Worlds, like Welless,
wisely and protably places itself within an updated historical contextin
this case a post-9/11 spectacle of terrorit fails to engage the audience with
the sense of reality that Welless radio adaptation was able to imbue, never
challenging the realm of fantasy. Focused on the spectacle of violence rather
than the terror of invasion, Spielbergs War of the Worlds fails to authentically engage the audience.
The latter half of this chapter examines a countertradition to directorial
branding that nonetheless emanates from the Wellesian brand. The concept
of truthiness reects the erosion of truth in mass media and the instability of individual notions of agency and truth. Truthiness thus implicitly
problematizes the type of artistic unity that cinematic theories like auteurism celebrate. Instead, the exploration of truthiness focuses on community
sense making and emphasizes comic satire over epic tragedy. The popularity
of contemporary fake news shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report suggests that, while Welles provoked mass awareness of the potential of
truthiness in his 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast, the logical (or illogical)
conclusion of his career-long exploration of the line between fact and ction has been the reduction of panic to laughter. The once provocative use
of a news format for the purpose of ction has become so familiar that it is

AFTERWORD

now a joke. In fact, these fake news shows have more in common structurally with Welless War of the Worlds broadcast than does Spielbergs direct
adaptation of the original text. Ultimately, the Wellesian brand spawned as
many progeny in political satire as in cinema.
Christ on Film in American Culture
At the heart of the rise and decline of The Passion of the Christ as a dening
project for Mel Gibson as a director are two competing claims. The rst
assertion should sound familiar to disciples of Welles: Gibson staked his
reputation as a star director on the assertion that his lm was authentic in
its attention to details of suering and emotional resonance. Second, Gibson
attempted to minimize the post-Shoah repercussions of any project focused
on the crucixion of Christ by aligning himself with the suering protagonist
and denying the potential for anti-Semitic interpretations of the lm. The
second assertion ultimately proved fatal to his emerging reputation as a star
director (at least temporarilyas Welles would be the rst to point out, there
is always a chance for self-reinvention in Hollywood). Due to both the critical
aftermath of The Passion of the Christ and Gibsons eventual self-destructive
anti-Semitic outburst and arrest, he became an iconic image of how to be a
negative spokesperson for a directorial brand.
Attitudes toward the commercial representation of Christ shifted during the forty years between Welless Christ proposal and Gibsons project,
but some aspects of religious controversy were retained. Certainly there is
much to be studied in terms of the commodication of Christianityand of
religion in generalin twenty-rst-century American society.9 But central to
Gibsons Christ story, and to many other directorial interpretations of Christ
as well, is the spectacle of suering. The Christ project engages star directors
for the same reason that the Holocaust lm proves an alluring eld on which
to establish directorial credibility: it aords both prestige and controversy.
The controversy in Welless time as in Gibsons tended to focus on the desire
for authenticity, although the denitions of this term relative to Christianity have changed over time. As discussed in the rst chapter, the potential
debate over the Wellesian Life of Christ centered primarily on a Christian
perception of gospel-based accuracywould Welles present Jesus as divine,
and would he be willing to depict the Jews as responsible for his crucixion?
In Gibsons millennial era, concern with Hollywoods representation of the
divine appears minimal, and negative comments regarding The Passions representation of Jesus arose mainly in terms of the extreme violence performed
on his body, which was celebrated as authentic by some viewers and was
criticized as emotionally exploitative by others. Although Welles ran into

AFTERWORD

solid resistance from clergy in terms of trusting Hollywood to interpret the

Bible, twenty-rst-century clergy had few such hesitations, instead seeing it as
a good public relations opportunity for Christianity. Post-Holocaust, however,
the anti-Semitic potential of Christian propaganda became a greater concern
than theological or historical accuracy for many critics and viewers.
The sheer number and status of modern directors who have chosen to
take on a Christ project testies to its relevance as a directorial test. Christ
projects include D. W. Griths Intolerance (1916), Cecil B. DeMilles The King
of Kings (1927) and Nicholas Rays subsequent remake (1961), Franco Zerellis
mini-series Jesus of Nazareth (1977), and Martin Scorseses The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). Mel Gibsons Passion of the Christ, however, stands apart
in its entertainment draw for Christian audiences, many of whom seemed
to accept its images as closer to Biblical truth than earlier dramatizations.
Thus the theological debate surrounding this lm took a backseat to cultural
debates over its emotional impact, including potential anti-Semitism and
violence that could be seen as either inspirational or oensive.
Gibson positioned his film as an authentic rendering of Christs last
hours through three major strategies: use of Aramaic, Hebrew, and Latin
languages10 to give a sense of historical context, invocation of key scenes
from the Bible to establish textual accuracy, and stylized use of violence to
establish emotional connections to Christs suering. These strategies were
largely eective, although there were signs that the claim to authenticity
would be problematic even in early viewings. For example, a widely reported
endorsement of the project by the Pope dissipated under pressure11: in September 2003 and again in December, Vatican ocials refuted the alleged
papal assertion that the lm accurately depicted Christs death: It is as it
was.12 Ultimately, the claim to authenticity would center on the lms ability
to create an emotional viewing experience through graphically violent images
of prolonged sueringemotional rather than historical accuracy.
While some critics and scholars did attempt to examine The Passion of
the Christ as an interpretive work of ction within the Hollywood tradition
of representing Christs life via the gospels, even these critics returned to
questions of violence and anti-Semitism in the lm. For example, Adele Reinhartz surveys depictions of Christ on lm throughout the twentieth and
twenty-rst centuries, looking specically at which portions of the gospels
appear in various adaptations. Echoing the comments of Welless era, but
from a Jewish perspective, Reinhartz is particularly concerned with the
representation of Caiphas and the Jewish crowds as potentially anti-Semitic.
Reinhartz points out that Gibsons Passion draws from all four gospels and
primarily focuses on the spectacle of Jesuss suering, even from its opening

AFTERWORD

citation of the suering servant text from Isaiah 53: 35.13 The lm emphasizes in this initial epigraph that the crowd will be healed by Christs wounds;
therefore, the wounds themselves become the centerpiece of the lm. The
question of authenticity in Gibsons version of the Christ story shifted from
the representation of history as based on the Gospels to the authenticity of
emotionand the power of the viewers experience dictated what truth
lay in the viewing experience.
Far from relying on the gospels as literal interpretation, Gibson uses the
suering servant quote, dating from 700 b.c.e., to provide a rationale for the
relentless violence to which the lm subjects both Jesus and the viewer.14
Bruce Zuckerman, examining Gibsons lm for realism, nds instead a highly
emotional and subjective interpretation. But this, he reminds readers, is an
inherent challenge of any Christ project, since the gospels are examples of
creative artistry and storytelling, and the true details of destruction and crucixionsmoke and ies in Zuckermans terminologycan distract viewers
from the emotional experience of the lm. Thus, Gibson immerses his lm
in emotional, rather than realistic, details of Christs suering.
The exaggerated and prolonged violence of the lm divided audiences
and was considered moving by many Christian viewers but as disturbing
or even pornographic by others. Despite Caleb Deschanels highly stylized
cinematography and the lms heavy use of symbolism, musical score, special
eects, ashback, and other techniques not usually associated with cinematic
realism, the realistic nature of the lm was frequently singled out for praise
by viewers on online chat boards. Kelly Denton-Borhaugs analysis of viewer
reactions on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) indicates that such sacricial images were absorbed uncritically by a huge portion of viewers.15 She
argues that the viewing of this violence was ritually cathartic for Christian
viewers who saw it as part of the calculus of salvation.16 For these viewers,
to suer with Christ seemed to become more authentically Christian. They
thus perceived The Passion as not a theological movie nearly so much as it
is a visceral contemplation of the agony of Jesus willing sacrice.17
This ability of The Passion to arouse viewing pleasure through violence
can also be seen in secular terms, an example of the power of spectacle as an
antidote to postmodern alienation. Stuart Robertson suggests The Passion
aroused deeper emotions than sports or patriotism and thus lled a void
in the postmodern viewer for whom strong, authentic emotion is a rarity.18
This explains the appeal of the lm for viewers who did not readily identify
themselves as Christian but nonetheless found the lms prolonged contemplation of violence to Christs body moving. Realism for these viewers
emerged through their emotional relationship to images of suering.

AFTERWORD

For critics of the lm, the spectacle of suering proved more problematic.
Critical reactions tended to position the lm as melodramatic or pornographic but not historically authentic. Several critics saw the violence as a
direct reection of Gibsons own imagination, following in the tradition of his
earlier and equally violent (yet also protable) historical ction, Braveheart.19
Although both of these lms were controversial box-oce hits, Braveheart
was additionally celebrated by the lm industry, in part because it was seen
as an engaging historical epic, winning ve Academy Awards, including Best
Picture, and grossing more than 210 million worldwide.20 The Passion, while
nominated for three Academy Awards, in make-up, cinematography, and
score, won none and was a greater box-oce than award-show success.
The hyperemotional impact of The Passion led to its association with two
traditionally disrespected cinematic modes: melodrama and pornography.
Melodrama often connotes an excessive and maudlin emphasis on emotional
suering. Lester Friedman points out that protagonists in melodrama suer
for our sins; their torment caused by the intolerance, rigidity, and repressive
codes of conventional social order.21 The experience of shared suering
through spectacle makes the protagonists innocent victims worthy of our
compassion and admiration. Thus melodramatic characters attain moral
status chiefly through their suffering.22 For many viewers, The Passion
achieved this formula of identication through suering and produced a
powerful emotional experience, and it is precisely the level of violence that
is often cited by viewers as moving and praiseworthy in their online reactions to the lm. For many other viewers, however, the hyperbolic violence
of Gibsons The Passion crossed into the realm of soliciting pleasure through
violent voyeurism.23 Denton-Borhaug, invoking the work of Linda Williams
on the ecstasy of both the horror lm and the melodrama, suggests that The
Passion elicits the pleasure of scopophilia often found in the pornographic
snu lm.24 For Denton-Borhaug, the spectacle of violence in The Passion
becomes a form of divine domestic violence.25 Similarly, James Moore nds
The Passion nearly pornographic in its violence. 26 By regarding The Passion
as either melodramatic or pornographic, these critics position the lm in
genres known for exploitative images of feminine ecstasy and sueringa
gender inversion of the BraveheartWilliam Wallace association of violence
with masculine adventure fantasies. In turn, the association with these
low-brow lm genres assured the lms lack of critical acceptance, even as
it guaranteed box-oce success. Thus Gibson was treated as a star director
but not as a budding auteur.
One of the most interesting, yet underexamined, aspects of The Passion is
its exploration of nontraditional gender imagery within a traditional genre.

AFTERWORD

Its cross-gender appeal also broadened its potential swath of consumers.

Gibsons lm represents perhaps the height of this populist genre of the life
of Christ as melodramatic action-adventure lm. The lms use of gender
inversion makes sense, however, when one considers Friedmans assertion
that the protagonists of melodrama are really much closer to protagonists
of action-adventure than one might expect. Although the former is equated
with a feminine form and the latter with a masculine, the suering action
hero is really just a melodramatic protagonist moved outside the connes of
the middle-class, bourgeois domestic setting. Both are spectacles of suering,
but the melodramatic protagonist suers the whips and arrows imposed by
representatives of a vast social network of values, while the action/adventure
heroes endure suering as a necessary prelude to glorious deeds of bravery
and valor.27 Gibsons suering Christ straddles these two modes, suering
for social and cultural values but rising again in bravery and valor through
crucixion. As depicted by Gibson, Christ is a suering icon who fullls both
masculine and feminine ideologies, individually triumphing while sacricing for the community. This cross-gender representation also appears in
the androgynous representation of Satan in The Passion, creating a sense of
symmetrical gender ambiguity between protagonist and antagonist.
In a post-Holocaust context, however, the Christ-story genre has become
increasingly problematic. In the preWorld War II context of Orson Welless
Life of Christ, before the horrors of the Holocaust were fully known to U.S.
viewers, the potential impact of anti-Semitic interpretations of the Christ
story were rarely publicly considered. Concerned for the potential impact
of the project, Welles wrote to Christian, not Jewish, leaders. Furthermore,
the reactions by clergy show concern for authenticity only in terms of their
idea that the Jewish community be represented as directly responsible for
Christs death. American culture had yet to acknowledge the severity or the
depth of potential anti-Semitic violence. While authenticity was a major
concern in Gibsons post-Holocaust era, the question of perspective also
become paramountwhose authenticity?
In a contemporary cultural context, the question of depicting the Jewish
community as responsible for the death of Christ (or the even greater crime
of deicide) invokes an array of concerns that demand consideration. Steven
Leonard Jacobs reviews the multiple reactions to Gibsons lm within the
American Jewish community and argues that the discrepancy between Jewish and Christian viewing experiences lies in the perception by Christians
that the lm was a religio-theological experience; for Jews the lm was an
historical experience. 28 For viewers of any denomination, the emotional
power of the lm was diminished if seen in the context of historically anti

AFTERWORD

Semitic representations of Judaism and realities of Jewish suering. The

lms prolonged exploration of crucixion at the expense of themes like
resurrection and salvation increased the sense of pornography for viewers
who did not experience an emotional connection with these images of violence. Specically rejecting the hyperemotional focus on Christs suering,
James Moore argues that contemporary contexts call for a move away from
theologies of sacricial suering toward theologies of respect for the other
as the central redeeming act.29 These calls for a post-Shoah reinterpretation
of the violent spectacle of Christs suering are made all the more potent by
Gibsons ensuing drunken anti-Semitic tirade, undermining his denial during
the controversy surrounding The Passion that there were anti-Semitic images
within his lm. In a post-Shoah context, even Gibson had to acknowledge
the existence of anti-Semitism, even if only to disavow it.
As a star director, Gibson enjoyed a meteoric rise in 2004, followed by a
disastrous fall after his drunk-driving arrest and accompanying anti-Semitic
outburst in July 2006. The Passion of the Christ had an overwhelmingly
positive impact on Gibsons star director status: in 2003 Gibson didnt even
appear on the Forbes list of top one hundred celebrity power rankings.30 In
2004, he was at the top of the list, buoyed in part by his 210 million prot
from The Passion. 31 Gibson used an innovative marketing strategy for The
Passion that helped solidify a broad Christian market. The lms low-key
promotional strategy has been described as below-the-radar in its ability to target sympathetic audiences at small venues.32 For example, Gibson
took the lm to Colorado Springs for a screening at Ted Haggards New Life
Church, where it was praised as historically and theologically accurate
by Don Hodel, president of Focus on the Family. To this audience, Gibson
emphasized his lm as an ecstatic vision of religious truth: The Holy Ghost
was working through me on this lm, and I was just directing trac[. . . .] I
hope the lm has the power to evangelize.33
In contrast to Welless active solicitation of perspectives on his Christ
project, Gibson deeply resisted incorporating criticism from audiences
beyond his target niche. He responded to prerelease criticism from a nineperson panel composed of Catholic and Jewish leaders by threatening to sue
them.34 Gibson was also contacted with concerns regarding The Passion by
a variety of Jewish organizations, including the Simon Wiesenthal Center,
which articulated two overall worries about the lms potential impact:
that it might provoke anti-Semitism, including Holocaust denial, and that
it might negatively aect Jewish-Christian relations.35 Jewish organizations
situated the potentially anti-Semitic images within the lm as the latest in a
vast repository of Jewish caricatures in Western literature and culture. The

AFTERWORD

Anti-Defamation Leagues advisor on interfaith aairs accused Gibson of

re-creating images akin to Fagin [. . .] or Shylock. 36 Both of these canonical
gures hail from classic literature that Welles adapted for mass consumption,
but they read quite dierently in a post-Shoah popular culture. Even authors
with the status of Dickens and Shakespeare are not immune to cultural reevaluation, and the prestige of classic literary adaptation can become a yoke
that weighs down the potential auteur.
The nine-member group of Catholic and Jewish scholars that convened
prior to the lms release articulated at length the most prevalent concern
regarding The Passion. The panel, convened by the Anti-Defamation League
(ADL), produced an 18-page report warning that parts of the lm would
revive charges that Jews collectively were Christ killers. 37 The assertion,
initially dismissed by many viewers, that The Passion shows that Christians
have taken to heart the grotesque images of the Crusades, the medieval
pogroms, and the Holocaust,38 holds more credibility in the context of its
star directors later postproduction, o-set behavior.
Unlike Welles, Gibson remained deaf to even the most persistent and direct statements of unease regarding his lm project. Gibson equated himself
with his lm project, playing both a repentant sinner who seeks redemption
through the lm and a suering creator who fears persecution at the hands
of an angry Jewish mob. 39 When Abraham Foxman, director of the ADL,
wrote directly to Gibson on March 24, 2003, and again on January 23, 2004,
asking him to soften any depiction of the Jews as responsible for Christs
death, Gibson at rst refused to respond and then responded perfunctorily.40
Asked in January 2003 if his lm would upset Jewish viewers, Gibson said,
It may. Its not meant to. I think its meant to just tell the truth. I want to
be as truthful as possible.41 By rejecting negative feedback and positioning
his lm as an authentic vision of the death of Christ, Gibson chose to market the lm to a niche Christian market, and his marketing strategy wisely
focused on this niche.
Gibson united two major segments of American Christian moviegoers
evangelical Christians and Catholicsby combining a Baroque Catholic
sensibility with Protestant blood-atonement theology for a broad Christian
appeal.42 Describing the strength of the Christian market segment, Nicole
Gull asserts, Theyre organized, centralized, and easily motivated to rally
around one man: Jesus Christ.43 The distribution and marketing of the lm
catered to this audience: the distributor, Newmarket, specialized in locating
niche audiences44; one of the companies hired to promote the lm, InService
America, maintained a database of roughly 10 million Christian consumers
and contacted nearly 100,000 pastors to ask them to mention the movie in

AFTERWORD

their weekly congregation newsletters prior to the lms release.45 In addition, the Web site encourages readers to spread the word about the lm,
provides support materials for churches who want to host group viewings,
and links to a merchandise page that sells lm-related materials. This innovative grassroots approach to marketing proved highly eective, turning out
Gibsons target demographic at comparatively low cost. Positive responses
from these Christian viewers were also used to assert the lms emotional
authenticity and refute allegations of its anti-Semitism, thus increasing its
nancial success. Gibson was eectively positioned as a spokesperson for a
brand of Christian authenticity, as well as for the lm itself.
The strategy to conate Gibson and his work backred, however, when
his drunk-driving arrest in July 2006 threatened the market viability of his
overall brand name. The ADLs Foxman recalled the controversy surrounding
The Passion and used the incident to revive criticism of the lm. He suggested
that Gibsons drunken anti-Semitic outburst revealed his true self and shows
that his protestations during the debate over his lm [. . .] were a sham.46
Gibson publicly denounced his behavior, pronouncing himself wrong and
ashamed.47 Gibsons budding directorial brand suered, and his reputation
was damaged. Fellow producers such as Jerry Weintraub expressed personal
disappointment, and Disney dropped Gibsons planned Holocaust miniseries.48 His few defenders tended to tie their defense to authenticity in The
Passion. For example, James Dobson of Focus on the Family reasserted his
opinion that The Passion was not anti-Semitic and stood by Gibson.49 Dobson
may have been responding in part to a sense among some Christian groups
that Foxman and the ADL had launched a defamatory campaign against
Mel Gibsons lm [. . .] that treated Christianity as innately anti-Semitic. 50
Thus the defense of Gibson was seen as a defense of Christianity itself.
The Passion was an attempt by Gibson to solidify his budding reputation
as a powerhouse director and to complete his shift from actor-as-star to staras-director. This was a shift that Welles, like other directors, had wanted to
accomplish in part via a life-of-Christ project. Gibson partially succeeded,
since as Anthony Burke Smith points out he does t the popular image of the
rebel auteur who goes outside the Hollywood establishment to get his artistic vision screened. However, the controversy that accompanies any Christ
lm risks long-term brand appeal. Welles wisely recognized that while his
Life of Christ would bring both prestige and controversy, two hallmarks of his
budding lm brand, the circulation of the image of Christ in contemporary
popular culture is very dicult to contain. In a post-Holocaust context, the
Christ narrative is even more culturally complex, particularly when coupled
with the spectacle of iconic suering and deicide. The Christ project as a

AFTERWORD

genre, while commercially viable, appears dicult to integrate into a body

of work and to sustain as a complement to a lm directors overall career
because it risks alienating any one of a variety of Jewish and Christian communities for whom the narrative has great personal relevance. Therefore,
while it can meet the needs of a niche market product, it seems an unlikely
source to enhance an overall blockbuster cinematic brand.
Steven Spielbergs War of the Worlds
Another star-director vehicle, Spielbergs 2005 adaptation of War of the
Worlds, oers a sharp contrast to Gibsons project in terms of aesthetics and
marketing strategy. Spielberg, widely regarded as a blockbuster director, also
adapted a former Wellesian project as part of his directorial brand. Although
Gibson, Spielberg, and Welles could all be seen as pursuing the ideal of star
director, each has a very dierent approach to the balance between creative
authorship and salesmanship. Spielberg attained the commercial success that
eluded Welles but remains largely uncelebrated by lm theorists.
Although Spielbergs War of the Worlds emphasizes spectacle in ways
that Welless radio play could not, there are some similarities between his
adaptation technique and that of Welles a half-century earlier. In particular,
both directors accentuate the use of a limited-view, rst-person narrator as
envisioned by the original author, H. G. Wells. Both the earlier novel and
its radio adaptation produced narratives that coalesced with fears of their
audiencenamely the fear of invasion by another technologically superior
sovereign nation. Friedman suggests that the appeal of War of the Worlds
for both the original H. G. Wells audience and the later Welles audience was
that it encapsulat[ed] rst Englands and then Americas worst communal
nightmare: invasion followed by annihilation[. . . .] It was easy to envision the
Germans or the Russians attacking England or America, to substitute their
frightening war machines for the rampaging Martians.51 In both cases, this
fear of invasion was specically conveyed through a rst-person narrator,
engaging the audience directly in the process of interpreting events as they
unfold. In this way, Wells as author and Welles as adaptor invoke the same
rst-person-singular technique to establish panic in their audiences.
Spielberg shared with Welles the goal of directly embedding his audience
in the action of War of the Worlds, and the press kit for Spielbergs lm describes a camera technique that reminds one of Welless attempts to engage
the audience in a rst-person sensory experience in his rst RKO project,
Heart of Darkness. The press kit describes Spielbergs use of previsualization, a technique that strings animated storyboards into three-dimensional
digital sequences with the goal of putting the audience inside the events of

AFTERWORD

the lm.52 Spielberg also tried to capture H. G. Wellss original sense of rstperson perspective by using restricted narration, in which we share Rays lack
of knowledge of the aliens activity.53 This restricted narration also recalls
Orson Welless use of the reporter Carl Phillips to position the audience as
rst-hand observers to the events unfolding during the 1938 invasion. In
each case, the audience is invited into the process of sense making, creating
a participatory experience for the reader, listener, or viewer.
Another connection between the Welles and Spielberg adaptations is
their use of a common man protagonist with whom the audience identies. Welles accomplished this by using Carl Phillips to report man on the
street reactions to the invasion, while Spielberg chose to use the blue-collar
everyman Ray for his protagonist. This tendency to lter large sociopolitical
events through the eyes of an individual is a recurrent Spielberg technique,
which Friedman argues helps to create a sense of common people swept up
in events beyond their control, thus narrowing the gap between viewer and
protagonist.54 Spielberg supported this narrative technique with a correlating visual style, using sympathetic motion of the camera to help convey the
rst person perspective that is so crucial to Wellss novel.55 This restricted
camera motion mimics Welless use of the microphone in the 1938 radio
broadcast, which similarly limited the listeners experience by making some
noises almost inaudible to force the listener closer to the radio, using cross
talk to create the sense of listening to a crowd, or incorporating silence to
give the sudden sense of being cut o from the broadcast itself. These audio
techniques create an eect similar to that of sympathetic camera motion,
helping to create the lms relentless, terrifying mood.56
Welles used Phillipss on-site interviews with witnesses to the alien
landing in rural New Jersey as a highly eective method for narrowing the
distance between the listener and the characters within his ction, creating
the sense of a roving eye for the listener. Phillipss microphone allowed the
audience to see the ctional events unfold but also dictated their experience of events, just as camera movement in lm manipulates the viewers
perspective. Welless technique, in part because of its use in a live-broadcast,
in-home format, proved so eective at creating audience identication that
it created real panic from a fake event. This audio technique was a direct
precursor to his I = eye camera use as articulated for Heart of Darkness.
The ocular equation reappears in Spielbergs War of the Worlds in his use of
handheld camera shots, which simulate an individuals point of view and
cram War of the Worlds with visual images and verbal references to eyes
and seeing, not surprising in a post-9/11 America[. . . .]57 Friedman equates
these images with a post-9/11 preoccupation with surveillance, a postmodern

AFTERWORD

condition of living within the connes of technology, but a gesture toward

this condition, if not its full realization, appears quite clearly in Welless
early work as well.
Spielberg is sometimes juxtaposed against Welles in a low-brow/highbrow dichotomy58 that stresses Welless association with unmarketable yet
sophisticated cinema and downplays his huckster-magician entertainment
moments, which are particularly evident on television variety shows and
commercials. In contrast, Spielberg is often thought of as little more than
modern P. T. Barnum, a technically gifted and intellectually shallow showman who substitutes spectacle for substance and emotion for depth.59 His
lms are consistently commercial successes, oering a prime example of
a directorial brand with signicant audience pull over multiple decades,
lms that can be advertised as the new Spielberg lm rather than sold
via the starring actors. He is widely acknowledged as a savvy businessman
with undeniable commercial success. DreamWorks was sold to Viacom for
1.6 billion in 2005, making him the most nancially successful director in
Hollywood history.60 A clear example of the star director, Spielberg averages around 150 million domestic gross per lm; his rst project to gross
over 200 million was Jaws (1975), and his most recent lm to gross over
200 million was War of the Worlds (2005).61 For more than a generation,
Spielberg has consistently produced blockbuster lms. He has also, however,
directed a variety of critically respected, award-winning lms, including
Munich (2005), Saving Private Ryan (1998), Schindlers List (1993), and The
Color Purple (1985).
Spielberg sharply contrasts Gibson in his sensitivity to cultural context
and his ability to tap into cultural impulses not at a single moment or in a
niche market but over a wide range of time for vast audiences. Spielbergs
functional equivalent of the Christ project would be Schindlers List, which
although controversial in its marketing of the Holocaust, struck a critically
and commercially successful tone in its depiction of history and religious
suering. Aimed not at a niche audience but rather at the broadest possible
segment of viewers, the lm combined high-quality aesthetic choices in its
use of cinematography, narrative, and actors with a Holocaust storyline that
could appeal to both Christian and Jewish audiences. It was awarded seven
Academy Awards, including those for best picture and best director. Unlike
Gibson, Spielberg avoided alienating portions of his audience and paid close
attention to the cultural context of his work.
These elements of success in Spielbergs work as a star director might
suggest that War of the Worlds would be a cultural event with impact similar
to that of Welless 1938 radio broadcast. The cultural context for Spielbergs

AFTERWORD

War of the Worlds seemed ripe for a lm about the spectacle of terror in an
American city, and just as Gibsons Christ project cannot be read without
taking into account a post-Shoah context, Steven Spielbergs War of the
Worlds demands a post-9/11 interpretation. Referring to Spielbergs use of the
iconography of the World Trade Center attacks and the panic and terror
of such a violent experience, Buckland calls War of the Worlds Spielbergs
9/11 movie.62 Friedman sees the images of urban apocalypse in the lm
as evoking media coverage of both Vietnam and 9/11.63 Both these interpretations emphasize a spectacle of violence that Hayden White describes as
a modernist event in which the magnitude of violence represented would
have been unimaginable prior to the twentieth-century.64 Spectacle is central
to the Spielberg brand, which is widely known for using strong visual images
to create blockbusters.
Despite his attempts to engage the audience with techniques from the
earlier novel and radio adaptation, however, there seemed to be a fundamental lack of immediacy in Spielbergs lm. At the time of its release,
Spielbergs adaptationunlike Wellessappeared not to speak to the underlying cultural fear of American viewers who live in an era in which they
are more likely to invade than to be invaded, and who thus fear random
acts of violence over organized invasion. Unlike Welless War of the Worlds,
Spielbergs version reects a spectacle of terror rather than invoking terror
itself. (Spielberg does not make the theater go dark, giving the audience the
sense that they are under attack, for example.) This could help explain its
minimal impact on the viewing audience, which appeared entertained but
certainly not panicked by its images.
Although there are many explanations for the lms ultimate lack of power,
Friedman oers a compelling explanation based on the lms function as
cultural critique rather than cultural mirror:
Spielberg propels American viewers into a position of fear and trembling, of feeling what it must be like to have our country invaded, and of
facing a technologically superior foe intent on destroying our country.
[. . .] By doing so, he raises uncomfortable questions about Americas
role in the world as the remaining superpower, questions about both
its past actions and its future endeavors.65
Thus, Spielbergs War of the Worlds opens itself to a counterinterpretation
as representative of the Iraqi civilian experience during American occupation.66 While this implication would seem to be lost on most viewers, it would
explain the general lack of impact experienced by audiences. Whether one
attributes the lms failure to connect viscerally with audiences to its over

AFTERWORD

emphasis on spectacle at the expense of rst-person experience or its poor

thematic match to its cultural context, it appears that the audience was not
tempted to confuse its ction with fact. In contrast, the power of Welless
radio adaptation came from his ability to create the perception of invasion as
reality rather than entertainment. This perception was fed by the medium of
radio, since it beamed performance into domestic space. Much of Wellesian
performance seeks this conjunction between public and private performance,
and in many ways this theme is better suited to television and the Internet
as performance media than it is to lm. These media also lend themselves
to the exploration of the ne line between fact and ction, a theme that may
well be the greatest legacy of the Wellesian brand.
Tricks and Treats: Welless War of the Worlds and F for Fake
Welles is often positioned as a trickster gure in part because of his systematic exploration of truthiness. While one can read War of the Worlds as a
timely meditation on the threat of invasion or as a critique of the dangerous
assumption that radio was a trustworthy medium, it can also be read (and was
in fact presented by Welles himself) as a mere Halloween trick played on an
unsuspecting audience.67 Radio in 1938 occupied a rhetorical space similar to
that of television today in the American imagination. Radio then, like television today, served as a media source that Americans turned to for reliable,
real-time information about the world outside their homes, but in Welless
hands it was an equal source of tricks and treats for the American public. The
audience trust in technology has shifted over the past forty years, and in the
twenty-rst century, misleading the American public by media manipulation
has become a common political and entertainment strategy, although it was
regarded as dangerous and subversive in Welless era. In addition, the advent
of the Internet has added yet another media venue to the American home,
one that explicitly irts with lines of public/private and true/false.
Wellesian performance ts new media venues beautifully because it so
often challenges these very lines of public/private and fact/ction. Welless
cinematic experimentation with the line between fact and ction originated
in radio broadcast and reects a postmodern interest in eroding the concept
of the real. In an era of seemingly unbelievable political events ranging from
Germanys preWorld War II invasions of Europe68 to the advent of nuclear
warfare, Welles became adept at representing the confusion of modern consciousness as it evolved toward postmodern disorientation. His characters
often demonstrate an inability to construct a single truth when it comes
to personal or public history,69 and we can see their legacy in contemporary
broadcast formats that emphasize the concept of truthiness.

AFTERWORD

Robert Spadoni describes how Welles duped the audience into accepting
ction as truth in War of the Worlds, saying its ctitious news announcer
led already wildly imagining listeners toward still wilder visions[. . . .] 70
Welles would later often use constructed gures of authority like the news
announcer to mediate his tales: journalists, policemen, lawyers, and other
traditional arbiters of truth in society often appear as his narratorsmost
famously the reporter Thompson in Citizen Kane. War of the Worlds parodied
the trend of radio as a live news source by using radio as trickster rather
than truth teller. At the same time Welles revealed the potential power of
broadcast entertainment to forge a mass experiencebased on anger and
fear in this case.
This shared American experience was, in fact, a stylized technique for
simulating a feeling of real experience from performance. Welles established a set of performance codes in War of the Worlds that helped create fact
from ction in the minds of the audience. Harry Geduld locates ve specic
techniques that Welles used to increase the believability of his broadcast:
familiar-sounding political voices (FDR mimics), sound techniques such as
interruption and fade (music interrupted by urgent news), direct allusions
to the microphone itself (requests to move it closer for better sound), references to real places (Princeton, New Jersey), and fragmented narrative that
increased a sense of spontaneity (cuts to and away from broadcast locations,
simulated intercepted military transmissions).71 The conjunction of the news
broadcast format, ordinarily associated with truth, and a ctitious content
created powerful confusion in his audience. Anchored in the preWorld
War II political climate, the strength of this confusion increased to the point
of panic. The panic Welles created with War of the Worlds not only helped
solidify his career but also spurred an interest that would continue to preoccupy him throughout his career in radio, lm, and televisionan interest in
exploring the line between fact and ction in performance.
Catherine Benamou reads War of the Worlds as a carnivalesque exercise in
poking fun at publicly revered sources of institutional authorityacademia,
the government, the news media[. . . .] 72 Interpreting the broadcast as an
instructive lesson for the audience in how to evaluate credible information via
technology, Benamou asserts that the broadcast taught listeners not to take
for granted their access to, and reliance upon, radio communication during
an historical period when radio provided the most signicant source of news
for the majority of the U. S. population.73 But the broadcast was also instructive in brand loyalty and listening habitslisteners who misinterpreted the
broadcast tended to have tuned into the broadcast after it had begun, since
it had been framed by Ernest Chappell and Welless traditional opening to

AFTERWORD

Mercury Theatre on the Air and would clearly have been an entertainment
broadcast to those who listened from start to nish.74
Welless Halloween trick had technical and thematic hallmarks that
became indicative of his brand of entertainment, and of later genres of
truthiness as well. Benamou sees the combination of realism, fabrication,
and narrative discontinuity as tying together War of the Worlds, Citizen
Kane, and F for Fake.75 As we have seen in earlier chapters, the exploration
of truthiness appears perhaps most intensely in Welless unnished projects
and in fact may have interfered with their marketability. These works seem, in
many ways, ahead of their time. We can wonder with Benamou what would
have happened if Welles had lived long enough to engage the moment when
the cybernetic revolution reached the average middle-class household in
the United States[. . . .] 76
Given Welless innovative use of radio, one suspects he could have had
great fun with an interactive medium like the Internet. More important
than wishful nostalgia for technological evolutions of the Wellesian brand,
however, is the analysis of how the brand is being impacted even now by the
cybernetic revolution. Welless unnished works, once relegated to studio
lm vaults and Walter Benjamins trash of history,77 now have the potential to be recovered, interacted with, either viewed in traditional theatrical
settings78 or manipulated at home by viewers, readers, and listeners on all
types of media devices. Although signicant obstacles remain in terms of
copyright, access, and preservation, technology now oers unprecedented
options for interactively engaging with Wellesian performance works.
In part because of his fascination with the line between fact and ction,
as well as new interest in his unnished works, Welles has developed into a
cult media gure. Stagings of both Welless more obscure or unnished works
and new dramas based on his life remain popular. In the past year Washington, D.C., metropolitan-area theatres featured Welles as a character in his
own Moby DickRehearsed, Marcus Wollands Lost Eden: The Magnicent
Welles, and Austin Pendletons Orsons Shadow. Each of these performances
explores the line between the factual and ctional Welles; each creatively
interprets dramatic moments from Welless own life in theater, and each
depends on the audience experiencing pleasure from these presentations
theatrical versions of truth.
F for Fake oers us perhaps the best insight into what would or could
have become of Wellesian truthiness in the postmodern era. F for Fake
makes explicit Welless preoccupation with both the rst-person singular
and truthiness, as he acts as the audiences guide through a world of fakes
and forgeries in which he is himself implicated. Welles opens the lm with a

AFTERWORD

sequence depicting himself as a magician and then positions this magicand

his other performance momentsas fakes or forgeries akin to those of Clifford Irving and Franois Reichenbach. Welles calls himself a fake, a charlatan,
extensively citing his own War of the Worlds broadcast and his use of the
News on the March sequence in Citizen Kane as artistic trickery.79 Recalling the reception of War of the Worlds as truth by some audience members,
Welles positions their reaction as ridiculous by adding absurd visuals of ying
saucers attacking national icons as he describes the panic surrounding his
broadcast. This strange dissonance between his narration of the panic and
visuals undermining the realism of his broadcast have the eect of creating
a fake documentary regarding his own work, mocking his earlier fake news
techniques while critically commenting on the original work. Benamou additionally describes Welless use of newsreel footage of Howard Hughes in F
for Fake as a mockumentary, rmly positioning Welles as an early participant in the burgeoning fake documentary genre.80 Whereas Benamou agrees
with Scott Bukatmans position that F for Fake is a profoundly modernist
document on the postmodern moment, one could also argue that this lm
reveals Welless postmodern process in a modernist product. 81 Either way,
F for Fake is the closest example viewers have of what Welless unnished
works might have looked like had they been nished, that is to say, mass
marketed in a palatable form to consumers of their era.
Faking It: News in the Aftermath of Truthiness
[H]istory is untrue; true history is irretrievable;
and fake histories can be real.
Alexandra Juhasz and Jesse Lerner, introduction to F Is
for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truths Undoing
The truths of storytelling are not the truths of reportage. The truths of
reportage nally depend upon their correspondence to an externally
veriable reality[. . . .] The truths of storytelling may incorporate the
so-called real event, but they dont depend for their eect on the fact
that a researcher can corroborate the event occurred. They have to come
alive in the imagination of the viewer. And for that to occur the necessary
precondition is that they come alive in the imagination of the storyteller.
David Milch, interview by Keith Carradine

Studying Spielberg, Gibson, and Welles oers insight into divergent approaches to becoming a star director, each of which struggles to establish
artistic authenticity or truth. Whereas directors like Gibson and Spielberg
strive to create a sense of emotional truth for their audience that often
correlates with fantasy or spectacle, Welles played with the possibility of

AFTERWORD

unraveling objective truth. As David Milch describes above, the truths of

storytelling are not those of reportage, and when the signiers of these
two forms of entertainment mixas they did in various Wellesian productionsnew possibilities and confusions ensue. Blending storytelling and
reportage was a career-long interest of Welless, and the erosion of trust in
mass media and the establishment of truthiness as mass entertainment may
be his most lasting entertainment dowry. We can see Hayden Whites notion
of a modern sensibility to trauma shift toward postmodern absurdity when
looking at a distant media progeny of Welless War of the Worlds: the fake
news entertainment format. The fake news format demonstrates that what
used to instigate panic now provokes laughter in postmodern audiences.
Truthiness, voted word of the year by Merriam-Webster in 2006,
acknowledges media manipulations of truth, accompanied by personal rejection of the notion of a xed truth. While the word itself is not new, 82 it has
been redened as it moves into the mainstream vocabulary. Stephen Colbert
dened truthiness on The Colbert Report in October 2005 as truth that
comes from the gut, not books, and [n]ot long afterward, the American
Dialect Society named truthiness its 2005 Word of the Year.83 The following year, the public voted the term word of the year in an online survey by
Merriam-Webster, reecting mainstream preoccupation with the concept of
personal truths at odds with public truths. In the Merriam-Webster survey,
truthiness beat out google for word of the year by a ve-to-one margin.84
The proliferation of technology and its role in truth making is integral to the
concept of truthiness, and it is not coincidental that both top contenders
for word of the year relate to new technologies of knowledge.85
Welles dabbled in truthiness throughout his career, but the proliferation and multitextual availability of current fake news marks a millennial
shift from the skepticism and self-referentiality of the modern to the endlessly repeating, constantly shifting, seemingly ubiquitous availability of the
postmodern. Thus one can see shows like The Daily Show multiple times a
day, view excerpts on YouTube, and download and transport broadcasts to
an iPod or iPhone, even as Jon Stewart crosses from Comedy Central to
CNNs Crossre to be interviewed as a news gure. These media co-brands
are interdependent, and Stewarts show needs CNN to generate its comedy,
just as CNN in turn needs Stewarts comedy to generate news. The endless
circularity of this self-sustaining loop between news and fake news creates
what Aaron McKain refers to as a tail-eating snake and marks the blurry
boundary between the modern and the postmodern.86
Contemporary fake news shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report suggest that truthiness is a product of technological proliferation and

AFTERWORD

conglomeration, which encourage the blending of entertainment genres and

products. Truthiness ourishes through a process that Steve Gennaro calls
convergence, the merger of corporations and technologies to sell products
more widely and the resulting consolidation of the culture industries.87
Gennaro notes, At the turn of the millennium, the power of the culture
industries lay in the hands of ve multi-national media companies: Disney,
NewsCorp, Viacom, Vivendi Universal, and AOL Time Warner.88 These
culture-making industries nancially merge news and entertainment modes,
producing news entertainment formats in which CNN becomes narrowly
distinguishable from its AOL Time Warner co-brand, The Daily Show. These
complementary brands extend the audience demographic, appealing to a
broad cross-section of consumers. As Tad Friend remarks, AOL is using
the show to extend the reach of its infotainment programming to a younger
market segment.89
A precursor to the concept of truthiness might be newsinessnews
that incorporates aspects of the real but is subjectively altered for purposes
of entertainment. There is, however, no clear line between newsiness and
news (a theme Welles raised in Citizen Kane). On the contrary, with the advent of increasingly intrusive and manipulative technologies, media concepts
of news began to shift. By 1996 the word objectivity had been removed
from the Journalistic Code of Ethics, replaced with truth, accuracy, and
comprehensiveness.90 The journalists problem has become how to establish
truth without the concept of objectivity, whereas the entertainers challenge
increasingly focuses on exploring the play between multiple subjective truths,
often revealed through newsiness.
Welles experimented early and often with newsiness. As scholars have
pointed out, his use of the News on the March sequence in Citizen Kane
juxtaposes truth and entertainment, news and propaganda, public and
private selves. In fact, this segment represents a pioneering moment of an
entertainment genre that Alexandra Juhasz and Jesse Lerner study at length
in their anthology, F Is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truths Undoing.
Fake documentary depends on the audience interpreting the codes of fact
and ction and placing fraudulent news within the rubric of entertaining
ction. Pointing to Welles as an early pioneer of the fake doc genre, Juhasz and Lerner suggest the News on the March sequence elevates the fake
documentarys critical gaze from small-time oce to big-time politics.91
The fake doc emphasizes its skeptical role in relation to truth-telling genres:
while documentary attempts to claim an unmediated, objective and truthful transcription of the real, fake documentary undoes documentary form
and its traditional tropes of truth telling.92 In this way, Documentary lends

AFTERWORD

itself to a nostalgia of authenticity, while fake documentary acts to inoculate

against such easy revival and reclamation of what are, always, only images.93
For example, Welless News on the March scene in Citizen Kane looks authenticbecause Welles expertly mimics the realist style of his time[. . . . I]t
uses this form to tell the story of a recognizably fake but almost true person.
It is this known lie that brings what would otherwise be transparent form into
focus.94 The known lie allows the audience to identify the simulation of
truth without confusing it with truth itself. Welless use of the fake newsreel
within ction highlights the potential fraud of newsreel as a genre of information, and makes questioning this fraud an integral part of audience pleasure.
Thus fake docs revel in newsiness rather than news. Fake documentaries
critique the very possibility of objective documentation, pointing out that
many documentaries lie to tell the truth, and that all documentaries are
fakes in that they are not the world they so faithfully record.95
The dierence between Welless use of the fake-news sequence in Citizen
Kane and that in his War of the Worlds broadcast, then, is simply the proportion of the audience who had knowledge of the lie, who were in on the joke.
The concept of the known lie is critical to understanding the line between
panic and laughter when employing truthiness in entertainment. No audience, however, uniformly interprets the codes of the known lie accurately.
Hence, there are always a number of people who seek real news from
sources like The Daily Show,96 who panic during the War of the Worlds, and
who confuse Charles Foster Kane with William Randolph Hearst. In other
words, fake documentary is never uniformly fake. There resides in it a gut
instinct level of truthiness that is not conned by authorial intentionality.
Audience members are ultimately invited to construct their own levels of
truth within truthiness, and a repeated image can signify dierently over
time. As Juhasz and Lerner assert, Fake docs can blend the strict binary
lines that usually serve to comfort, stabilize, and segregate.97
The Legacy of Fake News: The Daily Show and The Colbert Report
During the early 1970sthe same era as F for Fakethe fake news show
entered the scene of American television entertainment in Saturday Night
Lives Weekend Update segment, which debuted in 1975. The popularity of
this segment spawned spin-os that evolved toward todays half-hour fake
news format for The Daily Show. The Daily Show (TDS) and its own spin-o,
Colbert Report, occupy a privileged position in television entertainment in
that they spoof real news while also participating in its creation. With the
diminishing possibility of objective truth, the question remains how (or
whether) it is possible to negotiate an accurate and comprehensive truth.

AFTERWORD

The importance of this question and the evolution of this form of entertainment took on increased national resonance post-9/11. To make sense
of the terror as it unfolded, people turned to a combination of news media
and personal communication devices. Even those most directly involved
in 9/11, the victims themselves, used cell phones to contact outsiders who
could help them make sense of the events happening to them by relaying
information from a combination of Internet and television sources. On this
single day American audiences relied intensely on technology to translate
an unthinkably horrifying reality into meaning, in the process revealing the
dangers of unreliable technology (and thus unreliable meaning). The events
of 9/11 sharply focused American culture on the anxieties of technological
breakdown and the potential for panic. War of the Worlds suddenly became
relevant again in terms of the spectacle of violence and panic broadcast at
a national level. What had seemed impossibleimages from the realm of
entertainmentsuddenly and disturbingly became real.98
The Daily Show and The Colbert Report share several traits in both form
and content, and both recall Welless War of the Worlds form in terms of
using a central journalistic personality to deliver newslike messages that are
nevertheless framed as entertainment rather than information. Yet unlike
Welless War of the Worlds broadcast (although much like his later broadcasts
in series like Hello Americans), both shows also oer information in the
form of interviews with political guresnewsworthy information, as well
as comic spoofs of news. As many critics have pointed out, the news content
of Stewarts Daily Show markedly increased post-9/11, when comedy about
the news seemed to demand some journalistic interpretation as well.
The humor of these shows, like the fake doc, depends on the audience
being able to recognize the known lie. To be able to read satirical codes, it
helps to have a single personality through which the satire is ltered. Like
Welless War of the Worlds, both shows rely on a central anchor personality, a rst-person singular, to establish the tone of truthiness. Because of
the essential need for the audience to read the codes of satire, the anchor
personality becomes more than a spokesperson for the show; he becomes a
brand name. Although Jon Stewart inherited The Daily Show from his predecessor, Craig Kilborn, the show has now widely become associated with
Stewart personally through public awards, interviews, and the establishment
of spin-o brands like The Colbert Report and products like The Daily Show
with Jon Stewart Presents America (the book): A Guide to Democracy Inaction.99 Based on the success of Colberts performances on The Daily Show, The
Colbert Report was created with just such a rst-person lter in mind. The
show is designed as a vehicle for Colbert, and the title of the show reects the

AFTERWORD

correlation between host personality and his truthiness brand, making clear
he cannot be replaced. The title also spoofs its own self-centeredness through
reexive comedyto match the egocentrism of the host, the t at the end of
Report is not pronounced, matching the pronunciation of Colbert.
Post-9/11, The Daily Show faced a problem shared with every comedy
show: how to make an audience laugh in the face of the unspeakable. But
TDS faced an additional obstacle in that its brand of humor depended on
political satire, and political events in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 were
very dicult to satirize. Comedians like Bill Maher were publicly chastened
for attempts to satirize conventional political wisdom, and most political
comedians had to nd new comedic ground, at least temporarily. Stewart
addressed this problem both by articulating his personal distress over 9/11
on TDS (a move he later derided as unmanly in an interview with Howard
Stern)100 and by inviting political and academic guests on the show to talk
directly about the war. Tad Friend argues this twin strategy creates a centrist,
mediating persona for Stewart, a centrism situated not between the right and
the left but between the top (our leaders) and the bottom (crappy TV).101 By
combining the sentimentality of the lowbrow, man-on-the-street reaction to
9/11 with high-power policy-oriented guests who could discuss the political
context for these events, Stewart solidied his position as mediator between
the mass audience and credible authorities. As Friend remarks, One sure
sign that our country is returning to normal is that The Daily Show is back,
and is being watched with pleasure by even more Americans who once again,
could care less.102 The reaction to spectacular terror in postmodern life seems
to be a diminishment of sensitivity, a distancing that allows daily existence
to continue despite knowledge of the potential for horror. In contrast to the
heightened emotional realm of The Passion, which was pitched as realism but
is more akin to melodrama, the entertainment challenge of fake news shows
after 9/11 was to address a heightened emotional sense of tragedy at odds with
the goal of comedyreality was impeding entertainment. Stewarts ability
to lead the American audience back into a comfortably distanced state, then,
was an act of public service, allowing the panic to subside into comedy.
Stewarts mediating position led to the rise of TDS as a source of real
news rather than just comic satire. Increasingly, TDS holds a complicated
and symbiotic relationship to its co-brand real news channel, CNN. The
Daily Show has been called the most trusted source for political news on
television.103 As Gennaro remarks, The fact that The Daily Show calls itself fake news but is perceived by the audience as being real, allows it to say
things that other news programs could not[. . . .]104 Its ability to walk the
line between news and comedy gives it latitude to critique current political

AFTERWORD

events rather than to report them. This also makes the show dependent
on real news from other channels for its material. As McKain observes,
TDS has a necessarily parasitic relationship with real news shows, and
its appropriation of news stories for satire serves to instill faith in the host
[organism], reifying conventional News.105 Since The Daily Show depends
on real news broadcasts to produce the material it then turns into comedy,
it is formally dependent on the Newss gatekeeping function even when
it is critiquing it.106 In other words, the real news still decides what is
newsworthy, since TDS uses the news broadcasts as a springboard for its
own program content and accepts as newsworthy topics being covered by
the real news channels.
To dierentiate his reedited, fake comic news from the real news
broadcasts that it raids for material, Stewart, like Welles, evokes a variety
of codes of authenticity but does so for the purpose of defamiliarizing these
codes for the audience. Many of these tropes are familiar from the 1938
War of the Worlds broadcast: the live, on-location broadcast, the interview
with the man-on-the-street, the deference to experts in interviews, all the
performative and formal qualities or strategies of the conventional broadcast, all the things that convince an audience that News is News.107 But
Stewarts broadcast also heightens or intensies these codes of authenticity
to make them visible to the audience and thus to make their manipulative
power visible as well. For example, the use of self-consciously nonlive live
reports in which the reporter, ostensibly on location, is in fact standing in
front of a blue screen only a few feet from the anchor desk, reveals that such
gestures of authenticity are silly and that illusions of time and space are
easily manipulated with technological tricks.108 The pleasure in this type
of comedy lies precisely in the access to the known lie. The audience feels
like sophisticated, jaded insiders, capable of deconstructing the codes of
authenticity and laughing at their absurdity. But in return, the expectations
for these codes are reinforced: the more capable the parody, the more it
legitimizes current gatekeeping congurations.109 Thus the parody of news
codes reinforces the codes themselves, and the humor is less revolutionary
than cathartic.
Comedy produced by the news can also become the news, in a reversal
of the process discussed above. Since The Daily Show does feature political interviews and commentary by Stewart himself, clips of it can also be
cannibalized by real news shows. McKain discusses the most obvious
examples of this, including the weekly The Funnies segment on George
Stephanopouloss ABC This Week. In this segment, Stephanopoulos runs
segments of late-night political comedy that comment on politics of the day.

AFTERWORD

By reabsorbing the comic within the authentic, This Week appropriates the
perspective of these shows without having to give up the obligations of a real
news show to index views and maintain an appearance of impartiality.110
It uses late-night comedians to articulate viewpoints that would violate its
own codes of authenticity. Thus fake news moves into the realm of the real.
As McKain aptly summarizes, [T]he more TDS appears in the News as a
source of news, the more its ethos as an expert source is emboldened and
the more easily it slides in as a source.111
Following the logical trajectory of the erosion of the line between truth
and entertainment in the news, McKain locates two future outcomes as most
likely: rst, that the News takes its cue from TDS and incorporates more
comedy and more entertainment into its broadcasts[. . . .]112 Katie Courics
move from The Today Show on NBC to the CBS Nightly News, oers a clear
example of this. Bringing in a morning show host to the evening news was
an attempt to increase ratings and entertainment value, making evening
news resemble the lighter fare of morning news.113 Couric was recruited to
compete for younger news viewers from the Internet and other alternative
new sources, and her news format includes an accompanying live Webcast
and the blog Couric & Company.114 Couric joins the genre of personality-driven, niche news brands that target specic viewer demographics and
have easy-to-understand names, such as Anderson Cooper and Keith
Olbermann. And rather than appeal to the taste buds, these brands are
engineered to please the opinion buds of specic kinds of people.115 Other
traditional political commentary shows like Crossre and Larry King Live
blend codes from entertainment talk shows and nightly news shows to create
an infotainment hybrid. So, it seems that this potential outcome is already
coming to fruition. As Gennaro says, The Daily Show, traditionally only
of comedic value, is used as a source of news, while traditional hard news
is becoming entertainment.116 So, it would seem that McKains rst likely
outcome has already occurred as even network news blends entertainment
into its delivery format.
McKains second likely outcome would be for the News to embrace the
very aspects that Stewart critiques: to accept that The News is fake, a pseudoevent.117 Of course the dierence between the rst and second option is
largely a matter of accent, since either outcome produces a hybrid mix of
entertainment and informationa move already acknowledged in the word
infotainment, which we can add to the roster of vocabulary reecting the
increasing instability of meaning along with google and truthiness.
As Welless own work from War of the Worlds to F for Fake demonstrates,
unstable meanings also open opportunities for alternative understanding,

AFTERWORD

oering an antidote to fascist truths imposed on the public by tightly regimented and controlled media images. Welles was an early innovator in terms
of the use of silence in broadcast, and one of the most revolutionary tools
of fake news shows might well be their use of restrained editing to keep or
create long periods of silence in interviews with pundits. Traditional news
formats reject silence and use editing and staged questions to give quick
and facile answers from experts. By refusing to edit out moments in which
these media experts are shown not to have the answers or to be silently
contemplating them or to be at-out dumbstruck, The Daily Show acknowledges ssures in authoritative knowledge.118 While this gives the sense that
The Daily Shows use of less heavily edited footage is more authentic, it really
is just as edited as conventional News, except that it is edited in such a way
as to call attention to how the [. . .] broadcast was edited[. . . .]119 Similarly,
Colberts unorthodox questioning of guests often creates moments of awkward or ummoxed silence, resulting in his audiences laughter. The joke is
that there are no experts anymore, that the trappings of authority are fake.
This cycle of reexivity and self-critique echoes Welless earlier methods of
cultural interrogation, making The Daily Show and the Colbert Report inheritors of a key tradition of the Wellesian brand. In fact, these shows derive
more directly from Wellesian entertainment than do supercially related
projects like Gibsons The Passion and Spielbergs War of the Worlds. The
reality television movement echoes the fundamental issues and interests of
the Wellesian brand in a way that adaptations of specic texts do not.
The primary legacy of the Wellesian brand is to create models for constructing alternative truths. With his War of the Worlds broadcast, Welles
opened up the possibility for listeners to construct their own meanings and
to pose hypothetical what ifs that were both disturbing and revolutionary. Welless response to the restrictive Hollywood studio system was to
turn again to innovative forms of deconstruction, using projects like Heart
of Darkness and Its All True to push the boundaries of what cinema could
represent and how it could convey political meaning. The result was a series
of innovative, challenging, yet unmarketed and distributed projects that
resonate with American culture today as much as when they were rst created. His unnished RKO projects are powerful reminders that unnished
works can hold as much meaningin fact can more easily embrace plural
meaningsthan can nished works, and therefore can support a range of
possible interpretations. New media forms oer a potential for regenerating
these important parts of the Wellesian brand in their unnished, multifaceted states. In contrast to a linear script or a nished narrative lm, perhaps
the more appropriate medium for examining these unfinished projects

AFTERWORD

would be their interactive presentation as a series of fragmentary texts,

audio les, correspondence, photographs, interviews, blogs, storyboards,
and media ephemera that invite a new generation of individual readers into
the construction of meaning. Intertextuality and irresolution are central to
Wellesian technique, and at last possibilities for enjoying these aspects of
his work exist. A generation after his death, media capabilities are nally
catching up with Wellesian innovation.

=^cTb
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Introduction: A Postmodern Auteur? Approaches
to the Unnished Wellesian Works
1. Krin Gabbard, Cinema and Media Studies: Snapshot of an Emerging Discipline, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 17, 2006, B14.
2. Ibid.
3. James Naremore suggests these characters use language as a hoax, attempting
to become colonizers of consciousness. Between Works and Texts: Notes from the
Welles Archive, Persistence of Vision: Special Issue on Orson Welles 7 (1989), 14.
4. Catherine Benamou draws an analogy between Thompsons quest for meaning and that of the cinematic scholar in search of Welless vision for his unnished
lm Its All True. Its All True: Orson Welless Pan American Odyssey (Berkeley: U
of California P, 2007).
5. Dudley Andrew, Echoes of Art: The Distant Sounds of Orson Welles, in Perspectives on Orson Welles, ed. Morris Beja (New York: G. K. Hall, 1995), 174.
6. The griot/auteur paradigm captures the tension between capitalist and communal traditions of storytelling. Whereas the West African griot gure reects an
oral tradition of communal history, the director embodies the concept of individual
creativity, key to capitalism.
7. Negotiates RKO Contract, New York Times, June 25, 1941, sec. 17: 2. This
contrasts truly griot lmmakers like West African Sembne Ousmane, who attempt to reject aspects of the auteurist tradition, even while being self-consciously
inuenced by it. See Jonathan Peters, Sembne Ousmane as Griot: The Money-Order
with White Genesis, in African Literature Today 12 (1982): 88103.
8. Orson Welles Manuscripts. Material from the collection is reproduced courtesy
of the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. All references to the
Orson Welles Manuscripts will be given hereafter simply as Welles Mss. accompanied by the date, if available, of the manuscript or typescript cited.
9. See Miriam Bratu Hansen, The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical
Cinema as Vernacular Modernism, Modernism/Modernity 6, no. 2 (1999): 5977,
for an interesting discussion of the hallmarks of classic cinema and its relationship
with popular, or vernacular, modernism.
10. The story of Paramount tossing much of the footage for Its All True into the
Pacic Ocean appears in several sources but is best positioned in context of the
surviving footage by Catherine L. Benamou in Its All True: Orson Welless PanAmerican Odyssey, 278.
11. Catherine L. Benamou, Its All True as Document/Event: Notes towards an
Historiographical and Textual Analysis, Persistence of Vision 7 (1989): 130.
12. For example, he revived his stage adaptation of Shakespeares Julius Caesar,
charged with references to modern fascism, for his radio show.

NOTES TO PAGES
13. The Magnicent Ambersons, his unnished Heart of Darkness, and the unproduced Pickwick Papers all derived from performances during a single year of radio
production, 1938. Even the grand rst-person singular of Citizen Kane resonates
in the title of the 1938 radio series, First Person Singular. Welless radio plays had a
profound eect on his process of narrative construction in cinema.
1. Origins of the First-Person Singular: Mercurial Theatre on the Air
1. Simon Anholt and Jeremy Hildreth, Brand America: The Mother of All Brands
(London: Cyan, 2004), 70.
2. Similarly, Michael Anderegg situates Welless work as part of a budding massmarket culture in America focused on selling the intellectual as a commodity, a
movement marked by the creation of the Book-of-the-Month Club in 1921, Great
Books seminars, and the use of radio as a movement to popularize culture. Orson
Welles, Shakespeare, and Popular Culture (New York: Columbia UP, 1999), 11.
3. Martin Lindstrom, Brand Sense: Build Powerful Brands through Touch, Taste,
Smell, Sight, and Sound (New York: Free Press, 2005), 135.
4. Ibid.
5. Patrick Hanlon, Primal Branding: Create Zealots for Your Brand, Your Company, and Your Future. (New York: Free Press, 2006), 26.
6. A later script by Norman Rosten for the 1942 show, at that point named Ceiling Unlimited, reinforced the classical artistry association by having Leonardo da
Vinci visit the Lockheed Vega aireld in California because he decided to see what
the century is up to in aviation (Welles Mss.).
7. Unless stated otherwise, all personal correspondence, press releases and draft
scripts are taken from the Welles Mss., Lilly Library, Bloomington, Indiana. This
letter, dated October 18, 1942, is also quoted in Simon Callow, Orson Welles Volume
2: Hello Americans (New York: Viking, 2006), 157.
8. Dudley Andrew, Echoes of Art: The Distant Sounds of Orson Welles, in Perspectives on Orson Welles, ed. Morris Beja (New York: G. K. Hall, 1995), 180.
9. Michael Denning, Towards a Peoples Theater: The Cultured Politics of the
Mercury Theater, Persistence of Vision: Special Issue on Orson Welles 7 (1989): 29.
Slavoj iek refers to these characters as larger-than-life in his Four Discourses,
Four Subjects, in Cogito and the Unconscious (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1998),
91101.
10. James Naremore assesses this pattern in Welless work overall: the audience
is invited to sympathize with characters who are also treated critically. The Death
and Rebirth of Rhetoric, Society for Cinema Studies Conference, March 11, 2000,
rpt. in Senses of Cinema 5 (April 2000), http://www.sensesofcinema.com.
11. Robert Spadoni, The Seeing Ear: The Presence of Radio in Orson Welless
Heart of Darkness, in Conrad on Film, ed. Gene M. Moore (Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 1997), 85.
12. Welles Mss. CBS Press Release, June 15, 1938.
13. Titus Ensink, Collective Misunderstandings Due to Misframing: The Cases
of Orson Welles (1938) and Philipp Jenninger (1988). In Semiotics around the World:
Synthesis in Diversity, vol. 2, ed. Irmergard Rauch and Gerald Carr (New York:
Mouton de Gruyter, 1997), 1132. Tim Crook explicitly ties Welless broadcast to
Herbert Morrisons live description of the Hindenberg disaster. International Radio

NOTES TO PAGES
Journalism: History, Theory, and Practice (London: Routledge, 1998), 9596. For a
further discussion of the techniques Welles used to confuse fact and ction in this
broadcast, see chapter 5.
14. Ibid., 1134.
15. Paul Arthur, Reviving Orson: or Rosebud, Dead or Alive, Cineaste 25 (2000):
1014.
16. Andrew, Echoes of Art 181.
17. Slavoj iek, ed., Four Discourses, Four Subjects, in Cogito and the Unconscious (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1998), 93.
18. Frank Tomasulo, Narrate and Describe? Point of View and Narrative Voice in
Citizen Kanes Thatcher Sequence. Wide Angle: A Film Quarterly of Theory, Criticism, and Practice 8 (1986): 48.
19. Naremore links Welless visual rhetoric in cinema to the fundamental tenets
of modernism: a preference for showing over telling, invisible narration, pastiche of
convention, and an at least purported lack of concern with audience (The Death
and Rebirth of Rhetoric).
20. Andr Bazin, Orson Welles: A Critical View. Foreword by Francois Truaut;
prole by Jean Cocteau; trans. Jonathan Rosenbaum (New York: Harper and Row,
1978), 135.
21. Welles Mss., Radio Annual, n.d.
22. Ronald Gottesman, ed., Focus on Orson Welles (Englewood Clis, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1976), 1617.
23. Naremore, The Death and Rebirth of Rhetoric. This quotation originally appears in A Trip to Quixoteland: Conversations with Orson Welles, by Juan Cobos,
Miguel Rubio, and J. A. Pruneda, trans. Rose Kaplin, in Cahiers du Cinma 5 (1966):
3747. Rpt. in Gottesman, Focus, 724.
24. Dudley Andrew points out, The issue of authenticity and certitude has always
been at the center of his lms. Echoes of Art, 173.
25. Naremore, The Death and Rebirth of Rhetoric.
26. Critics create various labels for the instability of narrative voice and suspicion
of speech within Citizen Kane. Stephanie Dennison and Lisa Shaw see it as a problem
of populism and propaganda (Popular Cinema in Brazil, 19302001 [New York: Manchester UP, 2004]); Tomasulo calls it an unstable economy of discourses (Narrate
and Describe?, 51); in contrast, James Morrison asserts that despite the rhetorical
instability of the lm, it is precisely a world in which truths can be discovered.
From Citizen Kane to Mr. Arkadin: The Evolution of Orson Welless Aesthetics of
Space New Orleans Review 16 (fall 1989): 17.
27. iek suggests that this questioning of the Real, the impossible kernel, the
antagonistic tension, is the very heart of modern subjectivity. Four Discourses,
96. He regards this interest in the truth of the fake as a Nietzscheanism. Four
Discourses, 94.
28. Dennison and Shaw call this style a contestation and rearticulation of the
rhetorical strategies of mass broadcasts and propagandists. Popular Cinema in
Brazil, 33.
29. As Paul Arthur remarks, Negotiating the skittery line between ctional and
non-ction discourses is a hallmark of Welless overall career. Reviving Orson.
30. Arthur, Reviving Orson.

NOTES TO PAGES
31. Naremore captures the positive role of the Mercury Theatre in inuencing the
Wellesian brand, asserting, The entire apparatus of representation in the Mercury
Theatre was keyed to his ideolect, allowing his manner to become so recognizable
and impressive that later in his career it could occasionally assert itself in movies
directed by other people. Between Works and Texts, 16.
32. To quote Rosenbaum, claiming that any version could have conformed to
his intentions necessarily entails a certain amount of distortion as well as wishful
thinking. The Complete Mr. Arkadin A.K.A. Condential Report (Criterion, 2006).
Similarly Naremore acknowledges, Even if we could recover every frame of lm he
shot, we would not be able to restore his career to an imagined fullness (Between
Works and Texts, 22). This nostalgia for an imagined wholeness also recalls Stuart
Ewens reinterpretation of Barthes dream of identity in which an elusive whole
self can be assembled via commodities. All Consuming Images (New York: Basic
Books, 1982), 79.
33. Quoted in Naremore, Between Works and Texts, 16.
34. Linda Ruth Williams, Critical Desire: Psychoanalysis and the Literary Subject
(London: Edward Arnold, 1995), 1.
35. For example, Tomasulo argues that in First Person Singular the players became
mere functionaries of that singular narrational agency and magister ludi, Orson
Welles (Narrate and Describe? 45). Slavoj iek similarly contends that the allegorical character of Welless obsession with such larger-than-life characters reects the
fact that their failure is clearly a stand-in [for] Welles himself, of the hubris of his own
artistic procedure and its ultimate failure (Four Discourses, Four Subjects, 92).
36. Michael Roemer argues, If we need to believe absolutely that our will is free
and that our actions lead to predictable results, we had best not tell or hear stories.
Telling Stories: Postmodernism and the Invalidation of Traditional Narrative (London: Rowman and Littleeld, 1995), 35.
37. Andrew, Echoes of Art, 172.
38. Tomasulo, Narrate and Describe? 50.
39. As Linda Ruth Williams asserts, Upon fantasy the subject is built[. . . .] The
subject is a creation of the story. Critical Desire: Psychoanalysis and the Literary
Subject, 17.
40. Citing the Brechtian notion of the provisional nature of the performance
text, Naremore notes that these texts emerge from the interaction of performance
and audience on a specic occasion. Once the occasion passes, the performance
survives only in memory or in fragmentary records. Between Works and Texts,
13. The Wellesian performance text results neither in a neatly nished commodity
nor in radicalized, collective, or corporate discourse but rather in an unorthodox
way of speaking. Naremore, Between Works and Texts, 17.
41. Lindstrom, Brand Sense, 131.
42. Welles partnered on radio with at least two brands that remain iconic today:
Campbell Soup and Lockheed aeronautics. Anholt and Hildreth cite both companies as examples of leading American brands (Brand America, 1819). Lindstrom,
Hanlon, and Anholt all cite Campbell Soup as a long-term brand that has held sway
since the late nineteenth century.
43. Welles Mss, box 1.
44. Welles Mss.

NOTES TO PAGES
45. Hanlon, Primal Branding, 6.
46. Ibid., 78.
47. Anholt and Hildreth, Brand America: The Mother of All Brands, 36.
48. For more on his Brazilian creation story, see chapter 4. Based on an article
in A Noite, February 9, 1942, and Tom Petteys correspondence on April 2, 1942
(Welles Mss.).
49. Welles Mss.
50. Hanlon, Primal Branding, 19.
51. Welles Mss.
52. First Person Singular: Welles Innovator on Stage, Experiments on the Air,
Newsweek, July 11, 1938, 25.
53. James Naremore, The Magic World of Orson Welles (Dallas: Southern Methodist UP, 1989), 13.
54. Welles Mss.
55. Ibid.
56. Hanlon, Primal Branding, 54.
57. Ibid., 72, 73.
58. iek interprets Welless use of deep focus as a visual rhetoric that conveys his
thematic preoccupation with the larger-than-life individual, a manifestation of the
rst-person singular, and his trademark formal procedure. Four Discourses, 92.
59. Anholt and Hildreth, Brand America, 78.
60. Arthur, Reviving Orson.
61. William Simon, Orson Welles: An Introduction, Persistence of Vision: Special
Issue on Orson Welles 7 (1989), 10.
62. In Reviving Orson, Arthur uses the example of the lm Casanovas Big Night,
which turns its extravagant ending into a joke played out by Bob Orson Welles
Hope. The ensemble musical comedy format of Hopes movies strongly contrasts
the sensibility of the Wellesian brand as outlined here. Welles seems to have been
aware of the disparity between his own work and that of Hope. A script of Its All
True in box 16 of the Welles Mss contains the following scene:
Med. Shot Passengers looking at Welles.
engineer: Isnt that Bob Hope?
army officer: I dont knowwhos Bob Hope?
63. Dennison and Shaw, Popular Cinema in Brazil, 36.
64. Denning, Towards a Peoples Theater, 27.
65. Ibid., 34.
66. Arthur, Reviving Orson.
67. Lorna Fitzsimmons, The Magnicent Ambersons: Unmasking the Code, Literature Film Quarterly 28, no. 4 (2000). For recent examples of the nostalgic auteurist
approach, see David Kamps article Magnicent Obsession, which searches for the
authentic Wellesian version of The Magnicent Ambersons (Vanity Fair, January 2002,
12237), and the similar-themed dramatic interpretation by Marcus Wolland, Lost
Eden: The Magnicent Welles (PBS DVD, 2004).
68. Welles Mss.
69. Ibid., 2.
70. Ibid.

NOTES TO PAGES
71. November 30, 1939, Welles Mss.
72. This projects use of another Wellesian rhetorical mode, primitivist expressionism, is discussed at length in chapter 3.
73. Spadoni, The Seeing Ear, 84.
74. For further discussion of Welles and Dickens, see chapter 2.
75. Heart of Darkness, Revised Estimating Script, Welles Mss., November 30,
1939, 2.
76. Naremore, The Magic World of Orson Welles, 21.
77. As Naremore points out, this I/eye approach is invoked as well in the script
for Mexican Melodrama or The Way to Santiago, in which the lead character has
no name; thus the script instructs he will be referred to in the rst person (Magic
World of Orson Welles, 23).
78. Spadoni, Seeing Ear, 80.
79. Guerric DeBona, Into Africa: Orson Welles and Heart of Darkness, Cinema
Journal 33, no. 1 (1994): 20.
80. Tomasulo, Narrate and Describe? 52.
81. Ibid., 49.
82. Ibid., 51.
83. William Simon, Orson Welles: An Introduction, 10.
84. The national theme was emphasized in the projects original title, American.
85. James Morrison disagrees that Kane is unknowable, since he reads the lm
as revealing truths and essences (From Citizen Kane to Mr. Arkadin, 7). This
interpretation would not challenge the assumption of this study, however, which is
merely that the process of Truth making is being questioned.
86. Dennison and Shaw, Popular Cinema in Brazil, 33. The tension between nation
building and the deconstruction of subjectivity arises even more markedly in Welless
RKO project Its All True, which adopts a news feature format for the purposes of
Pan-American public diplomacy and is fully discussed in chapter 4.
87. Naremore, The Magic World of Orson Welles, 17.
88. Richard B. OBrien, Unmasking a Hobgoblin in the Air, New York Times,
October 29, 1939, sec. 9: 12.
89. Michael Anderegg, Orson Welles, Shakespeare, and Popular Culture, 15.
90. Welles Mss., December 13, 1940.
91. Welles Mss.
92. Naremore, The Magic World of Orson Welles, 18.
93. First Person Singular, 25.
94. The Talk Shows, New York Times, August 14, 1938, sec. 9: 10.
95. Radio Notes, Newsweek, July 11, 1938, 26.
96. Marvelous Boy, Time, May 9, 1938, 30.
97. For detailed discussions of the evolution of the script of Citizen Kane, see
The Making of Citizen Kane by Robert Carringer (Berkeley: U California P, 1985),
as well as Pauline Kaels 1969 Raising Kane essay in the New Yorker, rpt. in The
Citizen Kane Book (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), and Peter Bogdanovichs response to
Kaelrumored to be coauthored by WellesThe Kane Mutiny in Esquire, October
1972, 95105, 18090. Joseph McBride oers a synopsis of these articles as well in
What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? (Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2006), 3738;
Clinton Heylin reviews various changes to the scripts in his chapter The Wellesian
Mosaic, in Despite the System (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2005), 3974.

NOTES TO PAGES
98. Wilson-Welles Archives, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, box 18.
99. Most of the correspondence for these years is contained in box 1 of the Welles
Mss.
100. For more on Welless FBI le and Native Son, see McBride, What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? 52.
101. Welles Mss., December 9, 1940. In contrast to the fractious debate over
authorship at RKO, Welles continued to collaborate on stage and radio. A February
14, 1941, memo indicates a partnership for Native Son, in which stock was divided
among Welles, Houseman, and Mankiewicz. Mankiewicz received 5 percent of
prots. Welles and Houseman got 15 percent total: 5 stock interest plus 10 for
their services (Welles Mss., box 6). Native Son continued to oer Welles income
through May 1942, when it went into stock production.
102. Welles Mss., January 18, 1941.
103. Welles Mss., January 22, 1941.
104. Wilson-Welles Archives, box 18.
105. Welles Mss.
106. Hearst vs. Orson Welles, Newsweek, January 20, 1941, 62.
107. Schaefer left the studio in 1942, a departure that helped ensure the incompletion of Welless Brazilian project, Its All True. Its All True is discussed further in
chapter 5 and at length in Catherine Benamous study, Its All True: Orson Welless
Pan-American Odyssey (Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 2007).
108. This letter appears in both the Welles Mss. and the Wilson-Welles Collection.
109. Tomasulo, Narrate and Describe? 49.
110. See This Is Orson Welles for a brief description of the potential project concept
as described by Welles to Peter Bogdanovich. Jonathan Rosenbaum, ed. (New York:
HarperCollins, 1992), 361.
111. Andrew, Echoes of Art, 180.
112. The romanticism of domestic violence was deemed uncontroversial at this
point in time, with no outcry against a radio play in which the protagonist admits to
beating his wife and that features a loud audio slap as Liliom hits his daughter. The
play ends with a troubling exchange between mother and daughter:
louise: Is it possible for someone to hit you, mother . . . hard like that
. . . real loud and hard, and not hurt you at all?
julie: It is possible, dear . . . that someone may beat you and beat you
and beat you and never hurt you at all . . . (music up).
(Liliom, Radio Script, Welles Mss., Sunday, October 22, 1939, 114)
113. Most correspondence regarding Liliom took place between Diana Bourbon
of the Wheelock Agency and various Mercury employees (including Houseman and
Welles) in August 1939. Welles Mss.
114. Liliom, a.
115. Ibid., b.
116. Ibid., c.
117. Ibid., c.
118. These letters from clergy are contained in Correspondence, box 1, of the
Welles Mss.
119. An exception to this would be the blunt reply from the president of the
Northern Baptist Convention: The production of such a picture [. . .] would require

NOTES TO PAGES
a delicacy of taste, and a depth of understanding, which are not ordinarily associated
with the motion picture industry and its actors[. . . .] Your suggestion, therefore, is
distinctly unwelcome to me and I should be very happy if the idea were allowed to
die before it is full born (September 3, 1940).
120. September 3, 1940.
121. September 3, 1940.
122. September 3, 1940.
123. September 9, 1940.
124. September 3, 1940.
125. September 9, 1940.
126. September 9, 1940.
127. In a detail revealing the intimate connections between Hollywood and religious organizations, he suggests that he can be reached at the home of Irene Dunne
about the 11th (September 9, 1940).
128. Welles Mss, box 1, 12.
129. Ibid., 2.
130. Ibid.
131. Ibid.
132. Ibid., 23.
133. Christ would have presented an interesting challenge to ieks reading of
the larger-than-life characters essential immoral goodness [which] is cosubstantial
with what their environs perceive as their threatening, evil, monstrous dimension
(Four Discourses, 94). The question remains how Welles would have shown the
moral struggles of Jesus Christ, and if his character would have incorporated the
dark complexity of Falsta, Quinlan, and Harry Lime.
134. Welles Mss.
135. Anderegg, Orson Welles, 14.
136. By his last RKO project, the growing discomfort with Welles as a romantic
lead is clear. In a script for the Rio project, his weight gain is referenced as an obstacle
to playing the role of romantic lead. The script girl character, Shifra (based on Welless
real-life assistant Shifra Haran), refers to Welles as a fat wreck (Welles Mss., box
16, folder 19, 33). In several drafts of this script, Welles is positioned as losing out to a
local man in a battle for a love interestwhether losing Shifra in Brazil or Marguerita
in Mexico. In a revised, more romantic version of the Rio script based on Brazilian
musical saudades, Welles tries to reposition himself as the love interest, writing,
Jack is the hero of the story. (Thats me. And, if you dont think I can play it, wait
til I take o another 40 pounds. The fact that Jack is Swiss or French, or something,
shouldnt lead you to suppose for a minute [handwritten addition] that the part is
suitable for Mr. Boyer) (Welles Mss, box 16, folder 23, 4).
137. Welles was a leader in the trend toward using stardom as collateral to move
into the eld of directing. The power and legacy of this trend is discussed fully in
the afterword.
2. Classics for the Masses: Dickens and Welles
1. Robert Carringer stated in a 1979 interview that Welles started out wanting
to be an American Charles Dickens. Qtd. in Joseph McBride, What Ever Happened
to Orson Welles? A Portrait of an Independent Career (Lexington: UP of Kentucky,
2006), 87.

NOTES TO PAGES
2. Grahame Smith, Dickens and the Dream of Cinema (New York: Manchester
UP, 2003), 195.
3. Smith says, In short, these two great artists are vulgar, they are of the people,
and this vulgarity is a felt presence in their work[. . . .] Dickens and the Dream, 184.
To which Welles oers this interesting counter quotation: Working for posterity
is vulgar. Qtd. in Benamou, Its All True as Document/Event: Notes towards an
Historiographical and Textual Analysis Persistence of Vision 7 (1989), 121. In this
sense, Welles rejects the notions of classic cinema for which his work is later
celebrated.
4. A. Johnston and F. Smith describe Welless adaptation of Archibald MacLeishs
social commentary play about the 1933 banking crisis, Panic, for March of Time.
How to Raise a Child, Saturday Evening Post (February 3, 1940), 40. Welles had
rst been cast by and worked with Houseman in Panic, so both their collaboration
and Welless interest in radio adaptations had emerged by 1935.
5. Brett Wood, Orson Welles: A Bio-Bibliography (New York: Greenwood P, 1990),
9297.
6. Michael Anderegg, Orson Welles, Shakespeare, and Popular Culture (New York:
Columbia UP, 1999). Andereggs study of Welles regards bricolage as characteristic
of . . . Welless activities over the years (40).
7. Orson Welles Mss., Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington. Unless
stated otherwise, all personal correspondence, press releases, and draft scripts are
taken from the Welles Mss. For further discussion of this publicity release, including
quoted excerpt, see chapter 1.
8. Qtd. in Smith, Dickens and the Dream, 7.
9. Welles Mss.
10. Anderegg, Orson Welles, Shakespeare, and Popular Culture, 13.
11. Leonard Manheim, A Tale of Two Characters: A Study in Multiple Projection, in Critical Essays on Dickenss A Tale of Two Cities, ed. Michael Cotsell (New
York: G. K. Hall, 1998), 65.
12. First Person Singular: Welles Innovator on Stage, Experiments on the Air,
Newsweek, July 11, 1938, 25; James Naremore, The Magic World of Orson Welles (Dallas: Southern Methodist UP, 1989), 13.
13. Grahame Smith ties this impulse to develop a fan base to Dickens as well,
suggesting that Welles desired a public, a public of the kind seemingly eortlessly
commanded by Dickens in his lifetime (Dickens and the Dream, 182).
14. Catherine Gallagher, The Duplicity of Doubling, in Charles Dickenss A Tale
of Two Cities, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), 76.
15. Metalevel here derives from Robert Scholess term metanovel, meaning the
foregrounding of the role of author and reader in a process of co-invention of ction,
a particularly important theory for performance and the study of metatheater, which
was a topic of persistent interest to Welles.
16. Manheim, Tale of Two Characters, 65.
17. Harold Bloom, Charles Dickenss A Tale of Two Cities (New York: Chelesa
House, 1987), 5.
18. Sergei Eisenstein, From Dickens, Grith, and the Film Today, in Twentieth
Century Interpretations of A Tale of Two Cities, ed. Charles Beckwith (Englewood
Clis, NJ: Prentice, 1972), 100.
19. Eisenstein, From Dickens, Grith, and the Film Today, 102.

NOTES TO PAGES
20. At the same time, however, Madame Defarge alienates the metalevel reading
public forever, paving the way for the readers pleasure in her own dramatic death
at the hand of Miss Pross.
21. Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (New York: Modern Library, 1996), 357.
22. Bloom, Charles Dickenss A Tale of Two Cities, 7.
23. His later radio version of The Pickwick Papers also focused on a courtroom
setting through the case of Bardell vs. Pickwick, according to discussions of the
performance in a 1939 meeting (Welles Mss.).
24. Several times in the bound radio script, Olivers lines are mistakenly attributed
to Brownlow, requiring handwritten corrections. Oliver Twist, bound radio script,
October 2, 1938. Welles Mss.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
29. In his detailed chronology of Welless career, Jonathan Rosenbaum also lists
Welles as playing Oliver Twist in this broadcast, but this would have represented a
last-minute casting change. This seems unlikely, since Welles also performed in an
episode of The Shadow the same night. This Is Orson Welles: Orson Welles and Peter
Bogdanovich (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 346.
30. Guerric DeBona, Dickens, the Depression, and MGMs David Coppereld,
in Film Adaptation, ed. James Naremore (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2000), 109.
31. Martin Norden, John Barrymore: A Bio-Bibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood P, 1995), 143.
32. Welles Mss.
33. Anderegg discusses this performance in his study Orson Welles, Shakespeare,
and Popular Culture as an example of a wedding of entertainment and scholarship
(11). The show itself is available at the Library of Congress.
34. Marvelous Boy, Time, May 9, 1938, 34.
35. Welles Mss.
36. Marvelous Boy, 34.
37. Houseman reiterates this goal in a letter on October 13, 1937 (Welles Mss.).
38. Qtd. in Barbara Leaming, Orson Welles: A Biography (New York: Penguin,
1985), 15253.
39. Welles Laments Wane of Theatre, New York Times, June 29, 1938, 12.
40. Ibid., 12.
41. By 1940 his interests would swing back toward theater. In an article proposed
to Colliers and later transformed into a lecture on what was wrong with Hollywood,
he predicted within three years there will be a ourishing theatre in Hollywood, a
theatre devoted [. . .] to the presentation of a program almost identical with that of
the Mercury Theatre (Welles Mss.).
42. Marvelous Boy, 32.
43. Naremore, Magic World, 17.
44. Welles Mss., May 19, 1937.
45. Howard addresses the letter to Housman and writes that he wants to express my enthusiasm for what you and Orsen [sic] Welles have done between you
(Welles Mss.).

NOTES TO PAGES
46. Welles Mss., February 9, 1937.
47. Naremore calls RKO chiey a designers studio. Magic World, 17.
48. B. R. Crisler, The Movies Come of Age Again, Etc., New York Times, August
20, 1939, 3.
49. Naremore, Magic World, 13.
50. DeBona, Dickens, the Depression, and MGMs David Coppereld, 110.
51. Welles Mss., October 24, 1940.
52. Welless draft number was 2525, and Weissberger considered it a good omen
that your age should be duplicated in your draft number (Welles Mss., October 30,
1940). As with so many biographical details of Welless life, there are multiple versions of why he never served in the military: at feet, bone problems, and asthma
have all been cited. For a summary of these stories, see McBride, What Ever Happened, 6667.
53. Welles Mss. November 13, 1940.
54. Ibid.
55. Welles Mss., November 25, 1940.
56. Welles Mss., November 28, 1940.
57. Welles Mss., November 13, 1940.
58. Welles Mss.
59. Naremore, Magic World, 85.
60. Johnston and Smith, How to Raise a Child, 40.
61. See chapter 1 for further discussion of the controversies surrounding Citizen
Kane.
62. Naremore, Magic World, 18.
63. Welles Mss., December 7, 1939
64. Welles Mss.
65. B. R. Crisler, A Week of Orson Welles, New York Times, January 28, 1940, 5.
66. They sought to keep their aair private because of her marriage during the
initial stages, but it emerged in the media, and they began appearing publicly as a
couple in 1941.
67. The Wilson-Welles archive holds sixteen-millimeter footage for this project
(University of Michigan, Ann Arbor). Draft scripts for all of the Latin American
RKO proposals can be found in the Welles Mss.
68. Welles Mss.
3. Exploiters in Surroundings Not Healthy for a White
Man: Primitivism and the Identity Detour
1. Heart of Darkness Plot Treatment. Welles Mss., Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington (September 15, 1939), 1. Unless stated otherwise, all personal
correspondence, press releases, and draft scripts are taken from the Welles Mss. at
the Lilly Library.
2. Guerric DeBona, Into Africa: Orson Welles and Heart of Darkness, Cinema
Journal 33, no. 3 (spring 1994): 1634.
3. By the late 1930s, Amos n Andy, like Welless Mercury Theatre on the Air, was
sponsored by Campbell Soup on CBS. Amos n Andys popularity was well established
in the 1930s, although its audience dropped from 29 million to 19.5 million over the
course of the decade, according to Elizabeth McLeod (Amos n Andyby the

NOTES TO PAGES
Numbers: Analyzing Audience Statistics for Radios All Time Favorites, http://www.
midcoast.com/~lizmcl/aa.html). Producer Ward Wheelock worked with CBS and
Campbell Soup on both shows.
4. Qtd. in Tim Crook, Radio Drama: Theory and Practice (London: Routledge,
1999), 14.
5. Qtd. in Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1990), 8.
6. DeBona, Into Africa, 17. The self-critical aspect of populist modernism, a
precursor to postmodern narrative, is often criticized for limiting artistic function.
For example, Dudley Andrew nds that Welless lms exemplify a cloying cleverness
that cheapens the artistry. Echoes of Art: The Distant Sounds of Orson Welles. In
Beja, Perspectives on Orson Welles (New York: G. K. Hall, 1995), 173.
7. Werner Sollors, Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones: The Quest for a Populust Modernism (New York: Columbia UP, 1978), 8. Sollors applies this term to the work of
Amiri Baraka a generation after that of Welles, but it is interesting how well this
term captures the work of both artists. Sollors describes this impulse in Baraka as
desire, despite his radicalism, for unity of life and art, literature and society through
all his periods and changes (8).
8. Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle (New York: Routledge, 1994), 245.
DeBona mistakes populist modernism for a substantive critique of the Hollywood
culture industry and fascism (Into Africa, 17). This essay agrees with Mercer that
the critique is ultimately supercial, not embedded in the structure of the text and
its production.
9. Welles denied that the Haitian Macbeth was his idea and credited it to his wife
at the time, Virginia. Qtd. in Barbara Leaming, Orson Welles, a Biography (New
York: Viking Penguin, 1985), 10.
10. Ibid., 240.
11. Welles Mss., translated by Tom Pettey from Ive Come to Brazil to Learn, A
Noite, February 9, 1942, 5.
12. George Crandall, Misrepresentation and Miscegenation: Reading the Racialized Discourse of Tennessee Williamss A Streetcar Named Desire, Modern Drama
40 (1997), 342.
13. Torgovnick, Gone Primitive, 8.
14. Some plays, like Angelina Weld Grimks Rachel (1916) sought to use this
nostalgia and romanticism to further African American political goals and to target a white female audience, but such sentimentalism was often seen more as light
entertainment than heavy-hitting politics.
15. Torgovnick, Gone Primitive, 9.
16. Miriam Bratu Hansen prefers the term vernacular modernism to popular
modernism because it emphasizes the quotidian, with connotations of discourse,
idiom, and dialect, with circulation, promiscuity, and translatability. The Mass
Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism, Modernism/Modernity 6, no. 2 (1999), 60. I would argue that vernacular modernism is a
linguistically focused subset of populist modernism
17. The portion of the Negro Theatre Unit devoted to African American written,
directed, and acted work was handed over to Countee Cullen and Zora Neale Hurston, among others. Simon Callow, Voodoo Macbeth, in Rhapsodies in Black: Art
of the Harlem Renaissance (Los Angeles: U of California P, 1997), 36.

NOTES TO PAGES
18. Richard France suggests that Welless Macbeth may have been inuenced by
W. W. Harveys Sketches of Hayti (1827). Richard France, The Voodoo Macbeth of
Orson Welles, Yale/Theatre 5, no. 3 (1974), 69.
19. Leaming, Orson Welles, a Biography, 104.
20. Ray Browne, Shakespeare in American Vaudeville and Negro Minstrelsy,
American Quarterly 12 (fall 1990), 384.
21. Amos n Andys longevity is stunning: it began in 1926 as Sam n Henry with
Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll and ended with Amos n Andy Music Hall in
1960. It also devoted two episodes to live-audience minstrel shows in December
1937, roughly contemporary to the Welles performances discussed in this chapter
(McLeod, Amos n Andyby the Numbers)
22. Voodoo Macbeths Harlem association also tapped into desire for the
urban primitive, a term Peter Staneld denes as oering a lowbrow populist
rebuke to the dehumanizing subjugation of modernity by evoking the agrarian
roots of black American culture against the modern cityscape. An Excursion into
the Lower Depths: Hollywood, Urban Primitivism, and St. Louis Blues, 19291937,
Cinema Journal 41, no. 2 (2002), 90. This would explain the longing of many New
York critics for African American vernacular to replace Shakespeares language, thus
completing the fantasy of urban primitivism by removing overt evidence of white
elitism from the production.
23. James Naremore, The Magic World of Orson Welles (Dallas: Southern Methodist UP, 1989), 8. In this play, three men in a shing cabin are driven to madness and
murder by the sound of Native American burial drums (57).
24. Burroughss son, Norris, has produced a graphic novel recounting his fathers
experience in this production. Norris Burroughs, Voodoo Macbeth (Engine Comics), 68 pp. http://www.forbiddenplanet.co.uk/.
25. Orson Welles, Macbeth, Draft Script (Welles Mss., box 5), 1.1. Since the draft
script contains page numbers rather than scene numbers, all references refer to act and
page numbers. Additionally, the Welles Mss. draft script contains only two act divisions
rather than the three acts of the nal production, but the draft script is cited here to
include handwritten comments. Draft and nal copies progress identically until act 2,
scene 3 in draft becomes act 3, scene 1 in the performance copy. A copy of the April
14, 1936, script is reprinted in Richard France, Orson Welles on Shakespeare: The W. P.
A. and Mercury Theatre Playscripts (New York: Routledge, 2001), and the production
notebook and supplementary materials are also available in the Library of Congress
American Memory project at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fedtp/ftmb1.html.
26. This despite the fact that the Haitian drummers were from Sierra Leone,
according to Wendy Smith, The Play That Electried Harlem, Civilization (JanuaryFebruary 1996), rpt. Library of Congress American Memory Project, http://memory.
loc.gov/ammem/fedtp/ftsmth00.html (accessed July 22, 2003).
27. Simon Callow, Orson Welles, vol. 1, The Road to Xanadu (London: Jonathan
Cape, 1995), 242.
28. France, The Voodoo Macbeth of Orson Welles, 68.
29. John Houseman, Unnished Business: A Memoir (London: Chatto and Windus, 1986), 97.
30. Currently there is a four-minute clip of the performance available on YouTube
(www.youtube.com; accessed October 25, 2008).

NOTES TO PAGES
31. The Haitian drumbeat spread outside the performance itself. Fascination
with the drummers witchcraft underlay the popular story that their curse caused
the death of Percy Hammond after he wrote a bad review of the play. Simon Callow
implies that Welles was taking great risks by referring to the silent and imposing
lead drummer, a genuine witchdoctor, as Jazbo (Orson Welles, 234). Houseman
recalled that that the drummers would not sing spells to summon evil spirits for
fear that the spells would work, and that they requested live goats to make into
drum skins. He described the lead drummer, Abdul, as knowing no language at all
except magic. Tellingly, however, he also remembers Abdul approaching him with
Hammonds review and asking if it was the work of a bad man in his version of the
Percy Hammond curse (Unnished Business, 97). It seems the pre-lingual primitive
had been reading his own reviews with a critical eye.
32. Qtd. in France, Voodoo Macbeth of Orson Welles, 68.
33. Callow, Orson Welles, vol. 1, The Road to Xanadu, 240.
34. Qtd. in Ibid., 240.
35. The Indianapolis Star devotes a three-paragraph story to the trio of child actors playing Fleance and Macdus children (The Stage, August 27, 1936, 10). The
childrens book Tree of Hope also dramatizes the importance of this production in
terms of oering black actors work at this time. Amy Littlesugar and Floyd Cooper,
Tree of Hope (New York: Pun, 1999).
36. Qtd. in Leaming, Orson Welles, a Biography, 101, 102, 100, 101, 100.
37. Ibid., 101, 105.
38. Welles was not a solo player in this power game, since reportedly Houseman
sought revenge on Welles for excluding him from rehearsals by carrying on long
conversations with Virgil Thomson in French so that Orson couldnt understand
what they were saying (Leaming, Orson Welles, 105).
39. This story is sometimes repeated with Welles replacing Carter in the touring
role, but at this point Ellis had replaced Carter (see, for example, Simon Callow,
Orson Welles, vol. 2, Hello Americans, 384).
40. Leaming, Orson Welles, 109.
41. Ibid., 109. This description does not match that of the local newspapers,
which speak of Welles primarily as former leading man for Katharine Cornell
and authoritative Shakespearean student (Harlem Macbeth on Stage Tonight at
Keith Theater, Indianapolis Star, August 25, 1936, 8). The Indianapolis Star gives
Ellis a tepid opening night review, and it remains unclear in which of the several
performances Welles may have replaced Ellis.
42. Ibid., 102.
43. This interpretation of Lady Macbeth epitomizes Audre Lordes widely anthologized statement at the Personal and the Political Panel of the Second Sex
Conference, in New York, on September 29, 1979: Only within a patriarchal structure is maternity the only social power open to women. Macbeth, with its focus on
primogeniture and power, replicates this structure, which is emphasized in Welless
directorial approach.
44. Callow, Orson Welles, vol. 1, The Road to Xanadu, 237.
45. Qtd. in ibid., 23738.
46. Robert G. Tucker, New Macbeth Presented at Keiths: Harlem Version of
Bards Drama Proves Unusual, Indianapolis Star, August 26, 1936, 11.

NOTES TO PAGES
47. France, Voodoo Macbeth of Orson Welles, 68. Original emphasis.
48. bell hookss chapter Eating the Other in Black Looks: Race and Representation explores the erotics of racial identity politics. hooks describes the assumption
that sexual agency expressed within the context of racialized sexual encounter is
a conversion experience that alters ones place and participation in contemporary
cultural politics (Boston: South End Press, 1992, 22).
49. This dierence correlates with what Alexandra Juhasz and Jesse Lerner call
the known lie of fake documentary forms, which is discussed further in the afterword. F for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truths Undoing (Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P, 2006).
50. Titus Ensink, Collective Misunderstanding Due to Misframing: The Cases
of Orson Welles (1938) and Philipp Jenninger (1988), in Semiotics around the World:
Synthesis in Diversity, ed. Irmengard Rauch and Gerald Carr (New York: Mouton
de Gruyter, 1997), 1132.
51. The supernatural suspense of phantasmagoria, which mixed scientic tricks
with gothic spectacle as discussed by Tom Gunning, for example, in his address to
the 2004 Literature on Film conference in Tallahassee, Florida.
52. For further discussion of this publicity release, including quoted excerpt,
see chapter 1.
53. Houseman, Unnished Business, 215.
54. Houseman wired Welles, Our obligation to do new book rst Sunday each
month is arbitrary date existing only in our own minds (Welles Mss., September
19, 1939). Bourbon responded, Ward [Wheelock] adamant we do book rst week
October or discard new book idea (Welles Mss., September 21, 1939).
55. Welles Mss., September 26, 1939.
56. Algiers, Bound Radio Script, Welles Mss., 1. Notes on Algiers are taken from
two related but slightly dierent sources: a recording of the broadcast itself (available
from Old Time Radio at http://www.otrcat.com/campbellsplayhouse.htm or from
the Museum of Television and Radio in New York City at http://www.mtr.org ) and
the bound radio script in the Welles Mss. Quotations followed by page citations are
taken from the bound radio script; those without citations are performance variations during the broadcast itself.
57. Ibid., 1.
58. Welles Mss., 6.
59. All these adaptations were based on the novel by Rogers DAshelbe. Algiers
starred Charles Boyer and Hedy Lamarr, and won Boyer an Academy Award nomination for best actor. In this sense it inverts the adaptation strategy Welles used for
Heart of Darkness. If, as Robert Spadoni argues, Heart of Darkness attempted to
weave the fabric of the radio medium into the visual eld of a lm narrative, Algiers
attempted the opposite: to bring a visual medium into an audio eld. Robert Spadoni,
The Seeing Ear: The Presence of Radio in Orson Welless Heart of Darkness, in
Conrad on Film, ed. Gene M. Moore (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), 90.
60. Bosley Crowther, Review of Pp Le Moko, New York Times, March 4, 1941,
www.lmforum.com/archivedlms/pepenytimes.html (August 1, 2007).
61. Torgovnick, Gone Primitive, 203.
62. As Torgovnick notes, public events made Freud increasingly willing to
entertain the disturbing thought that civilization was not a stable category and

NOTES TO PAGES
that civilized man could always, under pressures like war, become with impunity a
murderer who shows less remorse than primitive man (Gone Primitive, 197).
63. Torgovnick, Gone Primitive, 207.
64. Diana Bourbon, Letter to Ernest Chappell, Welles Mss., October 9, 1939.
65. The follow-script evokes the upper-class white womans body as a marker of
civilization again. The scripted conclusion to the show was a conversation between
Welles and Goddard in which he asserts, when there are no more greatly beautiful
ladies in the theatre profession, wed better climb right back up into the trees because
on that dark day the pleasant graces of our civilization will be no more, and the West
will have declined, indeed. But be of good cheer, listeners, barbarism is not yet upon
us. We are living in the age of Paulette Goddard (Welles Mss., no page).
66. Algiers, 10, 9.
67. Ibid., 70.
68. Staneld, An Excursion into the Lower Depths, 103.
69. Ibid., 103.
70. Algiers, 10, 12, 23.
71. This continuing impulse toward authenticity would get Welles in trouble
again in his unnished lm Its All True. See the next chapter for further discussion of
expense and failure in his quest for the authentic in an ethnographic incarnation.
72. Algiers, 69.
73. Gaby ts in a category of cinematic characters that I have labeled in other
articles as chatoyant, meaning racially ambiguous female bodies that appear variously light or dark according to context. See Exhuming Dorothy Dandridge and
Commodity, Tragedy, Desire for a further discussion of chatoyant bodies.
74. Here desire for Gaby and rejection of Ines embody Torgovnicks assertion in
Gone Primitive that oceanic oneness with the Other must be rejected for the concept
of civilization to hold.
75. Algiers, 1.
76. Algiers, 69, 71, 33.
77. Welles Mss. October 9, 1939.
78. Welles Mss., October 12, 1939, 6.
79. Algiers, 7B.
80. Ibid., 31, 72A.
81. Houseman, Unnished Business, 215.
82. Welles Mss.
83. Heart of Darkness, Plot Treatment, Welles Mss., September 15, 1939, 1.
84. This impulse toward universality of a psychological, moral struggle in Heart
of Darkness distracts from political context and is often used to counteract the argument that the implicit racism of the text undermines its value. For a skillful synopsis
and response to this debate, see the epilogue of Patrick Brantlingers Rule of Darkness:
British Literature and Imperialism, 18301914 (Cornell UP: London, 1988).
85. Houseman, Unnished Business, 215.
86. Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, 268.
87. Michael A. Anderegg, Orson Welles, Shakespeare, and Popular Culture (New
York: Columbia UP, 199), 12.
88. DeBona, Into Africa, 18. Welles may have had Sidney Howard to thank for the
idea for his modern Caesar. Howard wrote to Houseman on February 9, 1937, praising

NOTES TO PAGES
the production of Doctor Faustus and suggesting that you and Well[e]s would turn
your attention to Julius Caesar in modern dress (I have such ne ideas on that if you
want them)[. . . .] I have always believed that the best way to stimulate the writing of
good modern plays is to keep the classics a part of what goes on (Welles Mss.).
89. See Jonathan Rosenbaums This Is Orson Welles: Orson Welles and Peter
Bogdanovich (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), and James Naremores The Magic
World of Orson Welles for discussions of the connection between the fascistic radio
broadcaster in Mexican Melodrama and other fascist gures, and Robert Spadoni
to address the fascism in the Heart of Darkness lm script and both radio broadcasts (The Seeing Ear, 89). Richard France describes Welless use of the audiences
paranoia about the rise of fascism and the pending war in his study of the Voodoo
Macbeth (Voodoo Macbeth of Orson Welles, 67).
90. This is a similar approach to that of Coppola in his later adaptation of Heart
of Darkness, which transformed the text into an interrogation of American imperialism in Apocalypse Now, but as Michael Roemer points out, Coppolas adaptation
turns Marlow into an active gure, whose encounter with Kurtz has him emerge
a better manthe moral of many a Positivist tale. Telling Stories: Postmodernism
and the Invalidation of the Traditional Narrative (London: Rowman and Littleeld,
1995), 277.
91. The other half of the show consisted of a performance of Life with Father, quite
a contrast of themes: ordered bourgeois family life versus disordered psychological
and imperial decay.
92. Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, 265, and Jameson qtd. in the same work, same
page.
93. DeBona, Into Africa, 28.
94. Welles requested material from ve reels of Sanders, including footage of a
village dance, several uses of masks, animals, and drums, and the Sound of medicine
man. These requests represent literally stock visions of primitivismcheaply had
and widely culturally accepted at the time.
95. Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, 271.
96. All notes on budget, salaries, and production detail of Heart of Darkness are
taken from the Welles Mss. materials on this lm unless otherwise noted.
97. Welles Mss, September 1939.
98. The naming of native characters is inconsistent among various draft scripts
and budget estimates. Eventually, the eort to give names to such characters as
ogged native, Native woman, and Head of the Cannibal Crew resulted in a list
of Names of Native Half-Breeds generated by researchers, which contained names
like Popol, Kalmol, Weepal, Wroo, Mabol, etc.
99. Similarly, Ladies Wardrobe was budgeted at 450, but Native Woman received a separate wardrobe budget for 7.50. Since there was only one other major
female character in the cast, it seems strange to stipulate a plural Ladies wardrobe
that then specically excludes Native Woman.
100. As the lm drifted into deeper nancial woes, Welless solution was never
to reduce his own remuneration but rather to keep his cash owing through other
projects. RKO spent most of its money on Welles himself or on the cost of creating
the exotic locales, looks, and sounds of Heart of Darkness. Virtually none of the RKO
budget went to the actors who played the native parts. One plan to get Welles more

NOTES TO PAGES
money was to lm Smiler with a Knife, a straightforward patriotic thriller, quickly,
while waiting to get started on Heart of Darkness. According to a prebudget estimate
for Smiler in January 1940, Welles was to receive no fee for acting, but Welles and
Mercury Productions would get fty thousand dollars for Services. A handwritten
note explains, 55,000 has been paid to date for the services of Orson Welles and
Mercury Productions. 50,000 of this has been included above. The other 5,000
and the 4,000 still to be paid are tentatively charged to Heart of Darkness. Including only the 5000 so far paid, the total accumulated cost on Heart of Darkness is
103,500 as of 1-13-40 exclusive of any overhead. That is a staggering amount to have
spent in preproduction. In contrast, the total production budget for Smiler with a
Knife was estimated at 373,490.
101. In the Revised Estimating Script this character is named Carbs de Arriaga.
102. Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, 274.
103. DeBona, Into Africa, 23.
104. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (London: Blackwood, 1902; New York:
Penguin, 1999), 92.
105. Heart of Darkness, Plot Treatment, Welles Mss. September 15, 1939, 2, 6.
106. Heart of Darkness, Character List, no date, 1011.
107. Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, 266.
108. The September 15, 1939, plot treatment suggests, In Heart of Darkness the
camera has to function not only as a mechanical recording device but as a character.
The actors have to play the camera (which is Marlowe) [sic] just as if it were a human
being and not a collection of lenses, cogs and lm (1).
109. Spadoni, Seeing Ear, 89.
110. Guerric DeBona discusses the split of Marlows experience between camera
and voice-over (Into Africa 23), and Robert Spadoni attributes this strategy directly
to Welless experience with radio, remarking that Marlows narration creates a sense
of radio with visual accompaniment (Seeing Ear, 85).
111. The September plot treatment even suggests that Welless physical presence,
if properly enhanced in terms of darkness and masculinity, will leave the audience
satised in a way that more supercial romance narratives cannot: Mr. Welles is a
handsome young man as you know, and we feel that it is important in advertising that
he be a broad, muscular, tanned and handsome leading man[. . . . W]e feel that once
we get the audience in the theatre it will go away completely thrilled and satised
by the lm even though the picture is not exactly in the boy-meets-girl tradition
(Heart of Darkness, Plot Treatment, 2).
112. Revised Estimating Script, 89. All quotes for Welless script version of
Heart of Darkness are taken from the November 30, 1939, Revised Estimating Script,
unless otherwise noted.
113. Heart of Darkness, Revised Estimated Script, 2.
114. Spadoni, Seeing Ear, 87.
115. This visual collage style of storytelling matches Welless own creative process, as described in an unsigned letter to Leonard Lyons responding to his article
in the New York Post on September 26, 1939. Probably authored by publicist Herb
Drake, it outlines Welless development of a script for Heart of Darkness: Welles
started work on Heart of Darkness by pasting up the book in a large portfolio
and going through it page by page, editing it and making suggestions to himself.

NOTES TO PAGES
After several weeks of this he began to dictate a breakdown on the story. This, as
now bound, consists of 254 pages (Welles Mss.). Welless personal papers support
this process description, since several of his scripts contain similar pasteups of the
original sources for adaptation. Box 5, folder 32 in the Welles Mss. contains similar
markups for Julius Caesar. His creative process is literally one of cutting and pasting
of others ideas into a type of conceptual pastiche. Heresy in the capitalist culture of
copyright, this process and similar collaborations with Houseman and Mankiewicz
would increasingly be hidden rather than celebrated in the Welles mythology (see
chapter 1 for further discussion).
116. Heart of Darkness, Revised Estimated Script, 5, 9, 10.
117. Ibid., 21.
118. As Spadoni remarks, Welles was prepared to elevate the pun on the word
see to a structuring principle by taking advantage of lms opportunity to conate
optical and narrative point of view (Seeing Ear, 86).
119. This process is very similar to Conrads impressionism in which, Brantlinger
describes, the narrative frame lters everything that is said not just through Marlow
but also through the anonymous primary narrator (Rule of Darkness, 257).
120. Heart of Darkness, Revised Estimating Script, 42.
121. Heart of Darkness, Revised Estimating Script, prologue, 110.
122. Heart of Darkness, Revised Estimating Script, 50, 60, 61.
123. Ibid., 76.
124. Ibid., 108.
125. Ibid., 100, 99, 50, 106.
126. Ibid., 111, 112.
127. Ibid., 123.
128. Ibid., 131.
129. Ibid., 131.
130. Ibid., 132.
131. Ibid., 133, 144.
132. The September plot treatment of Heart of Darkness suggests, Welless study
of Kurtz is a politically moral but psychologically sympathetic portrait of a dictator
(Heart of Darkness Plot Treatment, 3). But the root of this portrait in the tradition of
romanticism is also specied: a handwritten note on a draft script asserts, Kurtz is
the Byron of a totalitarian state. What Byron would be if he had become president
of Greece (Welles Mss.).
133. Heart of Darkness, Revised Estimating Script, 16162.
134. Ibid., 147, 156.
135. Ibid., no pagination.
136. Spadoni refers to this conguration of sight and sound as creating an impossible sense organ: a seeing ear (Seeing Ear, 86).
137. Heart of Darkness, Revised Estimating Script, 167.
138. Ibid., 167.
139. Ibid., 168.
140. Ibid., 168, 170.
141. Ibid., 173.
142. Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, 271.
143. Heart of Darkness, Revised Estimating Script, 174.

NOTES TO PAGES
144. Heart of Darkness, Plot Treatment, 2.
145. DeBona, Into Africa, 18.
146. Welles Mss., December 12, 1939. The Breen Commission also warned that
Kurtz being insane might create a problem with the British Censor Board, who might
refuse to license pictures containing insane characters, as they would burials at sea,
which were regularly deleted by the British (Welles Mss., December 15, 1939).
147. December 5, 1939, RKO Pre-Budget Estimate, Welles Mss.
148. Welles asked for comparable production budgets at this time. An undated,
unsigned note to Welles oers gures for Memory of Love, with a cast cost of 239,000
and a total above-the-line budget of 420,636 for a 44-day shooting schedule, whereas
Fifth Avenue Girl had a cast cost of 160,000, plus direction, story cost, and talent
of 376,445 and a 47-day shooting schedule (Welles Mss.).
149. Welles Mss., November 27, 1939.
150. Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, 268, 270.
4. R Is for Real: Documentary Fiction in Its All True
1. Catherine Benamou, Its All True as Document/Event: Notes towards an Historiographical and Textual Analysis, Persistence of Vision 7 (1989). Benamou locates
the lm project at the center of a hegemonic struggle between the United States [. . .]
and the Axis Powers (primarily Nazi Germany) in Latin America (126).
2. Benamous comprehensive study of this project, Its All True: Orson Welless
Pan-American Odyssey (Berkeley: U of California P, 2007), takes a dierent approach
and thus comes to a somewhat dierent conclusion, emphasizing the politically
progressive potential of his work with the jangadeiros, Brazilian shermen known
for their use of single-sail rafts called jangadas. Because of this studys focus on the
intertextuality of the project as it exists in an incomplete but thoroughly documented
state in radio, lm, and correspondence, I emphasize existing relationships within the
Wellesian brand more than the artistic potential of actual recorded lm images.
3. The story of Paramount tossing footage for Its All True into the Pacic Ocean
appears in several sources but is best positioned in context of the surviving footage
by Catherine Benamou in Its All True: Orson Welless Pan-American Odyssey, 278.
4. Benamou, Its All True as Document/Event, 130.
5. Carnaval: Treatment for the Film Itself (Welles Mss., Lilly Library, Indiana
University, Bloomington, box 17, folder 6), 1. Unless stated otherwise, all personal
correspondence, press releases, and draft scripts are taken from the Welles Mss.
6. Through the time of his proposed Heart of Darkness, Welless articulation of
the Mercury Theatre adaptation process stressed working with classic literary material, making it fresh and new for the audience. In contrast, Its All True embarked
on a journalistic, yet ctional, exploration of contemporary life that extrapolated
on the 1930s radio practice of documentary expression, which William Simon
describes as a central practice in politics, the social sciences, and the arts of
the 1930s. Orson Welles: An Introduction, Persistence of Vision: Special Issue on
Orson Welles (1989), 7.
7. See Simons Orson Welles: An Introduction; Harry M. Gedulds Welles or
Wells?A Matter of Adaptation in Perspectives on Orson Welles, ed. Morris Beja
(New York: G. K. Hall, 1995); and Tim Crooks International Radio Journalism: History, Theory, and Practice (London: Routledge, 1998), for thorough discussions of the
impact of radio journalism and documentary ction on Welles in the 1930s.

NOTES TO PAGES
8. Je Wilson, A New Kind of Radio Program, Orson Welles (Lady Esther).
Wellesnet: Radio, http://www.wellesnet.com (August 1, 2005), 4.
9. In this way, Welles himself was uncomfortable with the romantic notion of the
author as a genius at odds with the laws of the marketplace in his construction of Its
All True, even as the studio and handlers like Herb Drake and Tom Pettey promoted
him through this paradigm (Benamou, Its All True as Document/Event, 122).
10. Douglas Gomery oers a useful analysis of Welless relationship with Hollywood in his article Orson Welles and the Hollywood Industry, Persistence of Vision
7 (1989), 3943, which also rejects the notion that Welles was passively victimized
by RKO in favor the view that they shared a mutually tumultuous and yet benecial
relationship.
11. Robert Spadoni, in The Seeing Ear: The Presence of Radio in Orson Welless
Heart of Darkness, in Conrad on Film, ed. Gene M. Moore (Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 1997), describes the process of duping the audience into accepting ction as truth
in War of the Worlds, saying it used a ctive agency disguised as a news announcer
to lead already wildly imagining listeners toward still wilder visions (86). Welles
often invoked constructed gures of authority like the news announcer to mediate
his tales: journalists, policemen, lawyers, and other traditional arbiters of truth in
society often function as his narrators. For more on this, see chapters 1 and 5.
12. Geduld locates ve specic techniques that Welles used to increase the believability of his broadcast: familiar-sounding voices, sound techniques like interruption and fade, direct allusions to the microphone, mixing references to real and
imagined places, and fragmenting narrative to increase a sense of spontaneity (Wells
or Welles?A Matter of Adaptation, 269). Welless use of these truth markers to
trick his audience is discussed further in the afterword.
13. See chapter 3 for further elaboration on Welless use of expressionist referents
to evoke authentic primitivism.
14. Stephanie Dennison and Lisa Shaw, Popular Cinema in Brazil, 19302001
(Manchester: Manchester UP, 2004), 16.
15. Benamou points out that the funeral scene in Four Men and a Raft, which
was filmed about a month after Jacars disappearance, must have provided a
much-needed catharsis for a community in mourning (Its All True: Orson Welless
Pan-American Odyssey, 94). Her research also indicates, however, that most of the
reimbursement funds for his death never reached his children, and that although
his family never blamed Welles for Jacars death, they never accepted it as being
accidental (Its All True: Orson Welless Pan-American Odyssey, 3069).
16. Ricks American Bar, Filmscript, Welles Mss., box 17, folder 1.
17. Ricks American Bar, 20.
18. The only clue to authorship on this script is a handwritten note from Les,
dated 1/14. James Naremore suggests that a likely source for this note would be Les
White, who collaborated with Welles in 1944 on a script titled Dont Catch Me.
Benamou sees the script as RKOs attempt to appropriate and salvage some of the
Rio footage (Its All True: Orson Welless Pan-American Odyssey, 282), but the number of revisions and dates on the script indicate he may have worked with this idea
at an earlier stage of the project, discarded it, and then returned to it in a salvage
eort. Whether Welles began working with this script idea in early 1942 or later,
it represents the more traditional studio expectations for melodrama mixed with
mystery, even if its themes of racism and fascism would have proved too risky for

NOTES TO PAGES
RKO management at this juncture (Benamou, Its All True: Orson Welless PanAmerican Odyssey, 283).
19. Plot Treatment, Rio project, No Title, Welles Mss., box 17, folder 4, 1.
20. Ibid., 9.
21. Ibid., 37.
22. Benamou, Its All True: Orson Welless Pan-American Odyssey, 69.
23. As Benamou has noted, there is a genre exploration in the stories as well, with
My Friend Bonito, the Mexican segment, correlating with tragedy; the Brazilian
jangadeiros tale reecting an epic form (Time magazine referred to their voyage
as Homeric), while the Carnaval sequence could be seen as a blend of straight
reportage and romance (Its All True as Document/Event, 139).
24. In its early stages, the project also had an African American biographical component, exploring jazz through the story of Duke Ellington. Charles Higham describes
this segment as inspired by Welles love of Negro life (Its All True, Sight and Sound,
1970, 93). As late as February 1942, RKO was preparing a contract between Mercury
Productions and Ellington (Welles Mss.) Benamou points out that Ellington was still
under RKO contract in July 1942, indicating Welles may have still been considering
The Jazz Story (Its All True: Orson Welless Pan-American Odyssey, 58).
25. In this way, Welles tried (and failed) to represent what Gloria Anzalda would
later term the mestiza consciousness, a borderlands sense of self that extends the
boundaries of identity to incorporate multiple geographical, cultural, racial, and
sexual perspectives and that derives its energy from breaking down the unitary
aspect of each new paradigm. Borderlands/La Frontera, 2nd ed. (San Francisco:
Aunt Lute Books, 1999), 102. Brazilian Carnival oered a temporary, cathartic setting
for this boundarylessness, since according to Robert Stam, during Carnival, all that
is marginalized and excluded [. . .] takes over the center in a liberating explosion of
otherness (qtd. in Dennison and Shaw, Popular Cinema in Brazil, 17).
26. Peter Staneld, An Excursion into the Lower Depth: Hollywood, Urban
Primitivism, and St. Louis Blues, 19291937, Cinema Journal 41, no. 2 (2002), 93.
27. An initial news release dated January 1942 suggests, The Brazilian section of
the lm was proposed by the Brazilian government to Joseph I. Breen and Rockefeller
in order to promote better hemisphere understanding (Welles Mss.). This would
seem to support Welless understanding that the motivation for the Rio project was
as much political as aesthetic, an understanding that he invoked often when tensions
with RKO increased in the late spring of 1942.
28. Welles Mss. Tom Pettey, Rio project journals, February 4, 1942.
29. Herb Drakes advice to Tom Pettey: O.W. has certain unpleasant habits such
as reading your mail [. . .] Dont mind him any if he is rude, he regards it as a time
saving expedient [. . .] he trusts always genius or charm to get him out of any situation. Sometimes the irresistible force meets the immovable object. At such times,
go into bomb shelter (February 4, 1942).
30. Welles, qtd. in Benamou, Its All True as Document/Event, 136.
31. Welles Mss. Tom Pettey, Rio project journals, May 5, 1942, 1.
32. In a shocking reminder of Hollywoods comfort with racism at the time, Pettey
wrote to Drake, Now we are doing the Voodoo or macambo stu which is dynamite
in Rio. We have a closed set, a studio full of jigiboos and a little set depicting a hut
in the hills. Ill write you a feature about it (May 5, 1942).

NOTES TO PAGES
33. Unless otherwise specied, the translations of Brazilian media articles are
contained in the Welles Mss., box 18, translated April 28, 1942.
34. Ibid., 1.
35. Ibid, translated May 20, 1942. Robert Stam also cites this article as evidence
of Welless impact on Cinema Novo in the 1960s. Tropical Multiculturalism: A
Comparative History of Race in Brazilian Cinema and Culture (Durham, NC: Duke
UP, 1997), 12930.
36. Benamou, Its All True as Document/Event, 136.
37. Of course not all Brazilians resisted the lming of the countrys racial and class
diversity. An article in A Manh argues, Our negro is an excellent value, or great
expression. There is no reason to hide it[. . . .] We should show ourselves as we are,
as we were made. Because if something good should come out of Brazil, it will come
from this consciousness of our impurity and our provincialism (April 20, 1942).
38. For an extensive analysis of the political implications of Welless lming of the
jangadeiros and the racial diversity of Brazilian Carnival, see Benamou, Its All True
as Document/Event (13637). She identies the representation of racial diversity
as anathema to . . . the Brazilian power structure and RKO (137).
39. Benamou persuasively argues that Welless attempt to document the social
realities of Brazilian life was politically daring, prescient, and technically groundbreaking (Its All True: Orson Welless Pan-American Odyssey, 226). However, despite
good intentions and high skills, he was unable to overcome the limitations of his
cultural and economic privilege.
40. Benamou, Its All True: Orson Welless Pan-American Odyssey, 9394.
41. Contrast Jacars reections on poverty to Tom Petteys remarks to Herb Drake
that the Brazilians appreciate money, but have no love for it. They get along just
about as well without it (Rio project journals, Welles Mss. March 31, 1942).
42. Untitled, undated scripts for Its All True are in box 17 of the Welles Mss.
Photographs and other supporting materials from this lm project are also held in
the Wilson-Welles collection of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
43. Welles Mss., box 17, folder 12. March 8, 1942: 7.
44. Ibid. March 9, 1942.
45. Ibid. no date.
46. Most sources date his death as May 19 (Benamou, Its All True: Orson Welless
Pan-American Odyssey; Rosenbaum, This Is Orson Welles), but Tom Pettey dates the
event in his journals as May 18, and an Operations Report for RKO also dates his
death on May 18. Welles Mss., box 18, folder 12; box 17, folder 13. American variations of the story often add dramatic detail. For example, Charles Higham relates
a colorful version in which a shark and a squid burst out of the water and upset the
raft, then the shark eats Jacar (Its All True, 95). A variant of this story appears
in a Time magazine article on June 8, 1942, which describes Jacars death During
the lming of a shark-octopus battle (Brazil: End of a Hero, 41). While Highams
version has been widely rebued, the drama and suspicion surrounding Jacars
death remains in his family, who variously appear to think he was assassinated,
was kidnapped, or planned his own disappearance (Benamou, Its All True: Orson
Welless Pan-American Odyssey, 3067).
47. Welles Mss. May 20, 1942. Most clippings from the Rio project, and their
translations, are in Welles Mss., box 18.

NOTES TO PAGES
48. Welles Mss. May 21, 1942.
49. Welles Mss. May 23, 1942. Even these accounts blame the movie industry
rather than Welles himself. Other responses aggressively defended Welles. The Jornal
dos Sports, for example, published a piece signed by Petronius and titled Orson
Welles Cannot Be Blamed for Jacars death. It asserts, [I]f Jacar had stayed in
Fortaleza, living the unpretentious life of the carnauba-straw huts, he would later
have suered the death of all his working companions. Jacar died as he should.
Welles Mss. May 21, 1942. Benamou points out that perspectives on the event were
politically and personally inected: none of those close to Jacar ever blamed Orson
Welles directly, and this disposition prevailed in the liberal Brazilian press at the
time. Its All True: Orson Welless Pan-American Odyssey, 5354.
50. Sergio Augusto, Quatro Homens, uma Jangada e um Cineasta, September
15, 2001, http://jangadanantes.free.fr/4homjang_br.htm.
51. Benamou, Its All True: Orson Welless Pan-American Odyssey, 226.
52. Benamou, Its All True as Document/Event, 132.
53. Miriam Bratu Hansen, The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema
as Vernacular Modernism, Modernism/Modernity 6, no. 2 (1999), 70.
54. Ibid., 63.
55. Ibid., 68.
56. Ibid., 68.
57. Barbara Leaming, Orson Welles, a Biography (New York: Viking Penguin,
1985), 114.
58. Qtd. in Higham, Its All True, 94.
59. Carnaval: Treatment for the Film Itself, 14.
60. Ibid., 2.
61. Adeus, Praa Onze was recorded by Welles in Cindia Studios; Saudades
da Amlia was recorded live for the Carnaval section of Its All True (Benamou, Its
All True: Orson Welless Pan-American Odyssey, 314).
62. Ai Que Saudades Da Amlia (aka: Amelia) by Ataulpho Alves and Mario
Lago. Published and controlled Irmaos Vitale. Administered by Peer International
Corporation. International Copyright secured. Used by permission. All rights reserved. In a draft script for the broadcast, Linda (probably intended to be Linda
Batista, who was cast in the Carnaval section of Its All True) in the script deftly
translates the lyrics for Welles, explaining, Hes singing to one girl and thinking
about another (Welles Mss. March 6, 1942).
63. Welles Mss., box 17, folder 6, 27.
64. For an elaboration on the role of Praa Onze in the cultural life and music
of Rio, see Daniella Thompsons Web site, featuring articles republished from the
online magazine Daniella Thompson on Brazil. http://daniellathompson.com/Texts/
Praca_Onze/praca_onze.pt.2.htm
65. Lyrics translated and reprinted in Welles Mss., box 19, folder 38. Original
lyrics by Herivelto Martins and Grande Otelo.
66. Dudley Andrew, Echoes of Art: The Distant Sounds of Orson Welles, in
Perspectives on Orson Welles, ed. Morris Beja (New York: G. K. Hall, 1995), 176.
67. Benamou, Its All True as Document/Event: Notes towards an Historiographical and Textual Analysis, 138.
68. Grande Othelo developed a career representing Brazilian Carnival, and in

NOTES TO PAGES
the 1957 A Cut above the Rest he again represents true racial and social democracy
during Carnival (Dennison and Shaw, Popular Cinema in Brazil, 17).
69. Carnaval: Treatment for the Film Itself, 9.
70. Plot Treatment, Rio project, 22.
71. Tom Pettey, Rio project journals, Welles Mss., box 17, folder 20, March 4,
1942.
72. Ibid., March 26, 1942.
73. Benamou, Its All True: Orson Welless Pan-American Odyssey, 140.
74. Pettey, Rio project journals, March 20, 1942.
75. Many of the scenes described in this plot treatment exist in the posthumous
compilation coordinated by Bill Krohn and Richard Wilson. The footage was released
in 1993 under the title Its All True, but not necessarily in the sequence described
here and without the Wellesian soundtrack.
76. Benamou, Its All True as Document/Event, 135.
77. Phyllis Goldfarb, Orson Welless Use of Sound, in Perspectives on Orson
Welles, ed. Morris Beja (New York: G. K. Hall, 1995), 111.
78. Carnaval: Treatment of the Film Itself, 5.
79. Ibid., 78.
80. Dolores Del Rio could have been central to Welless project, and according to
Higham, Welles had originally promised that Norman Foster, the director of both
Journey into Fear and the Bonito section of Its All True, would direct Dolores Del
Rio in a previously abandoned Mexican melodrama (Its All True, 93). A Mercury
Productions press release from Herb Drake on February 3, 1942, conrms the idea
for a ctional adventure story against a Mexican background [that] will star Dolores
Del Rio, but by April several columnists and Pettey were reporting the fracture of
Welless personal and professional relationship with Del Rio (Welles Mss.).
81. Carnaval: Treatment of the Film Itself, 15.
82. Ibid., 3.
83. Benamou, Its All True as Document/Event, 134.
84. Carnaval: Treatment of the Film Itself, 4.
85. Ibid., 4.
86. Ibid., 5, emphasis his.
87. Hello Americans, Brazil, Draft radio script, Welles Mss., box 10, 1942, 4.
88. Carnaval: Treatment of the Film Itself, 6.
89. Robert Carringer, Citizen Kane, The Great Gatsby, and some Conventions of
American Narrative, in Perspectives on Orson Welles, ed. Morris Beja (New York:
G. K. Hall, 1995), 120.
90. Ibid., 120. Carringer further identies certain American traits in narrative
that explain Welless literary appeal, such as the ability of fatherless characters to
reinvent themselves, the feeling of a special destiny, ambition, and the belief that
with pragmatic genius and innocent faith that all things will turn out well (Citizen
Kane, 127).
91. Qtd. in Hansen, Mass Production of the Senses, 65.
92. Qtd. in Ibid., 65.
93. Pettey, Rio project journals, March 20, 1942.
94. Benamou makes a similar point using Barthess description of the dierence
between work and text. In the text, which this study equates with the project

NOTES TO PAGES
rather than the lm, we are invited to return to the work of the lmmaker and the
crew while on location, an experience that is usually lost in the editing process as
select images come to eclipse the range of viewpoints and creative possibilities found
in the rushes (Its All True: Orson Welless Pan-American Odyssey, 62).
95. See Benamou for a further discussion of these visual and aural juxtapositions
(Its All True as Document/Event, 133).
96. Benamou, Its All True as Document/Event, 134.
97. Ibid., 126.
98. Ibid., 128.
99. Welless correspondence with Nelson Rockefeller at the Oce of the Coordinator of Inter-American Aairs in D.C. captures the political and artistic tensions
in this project. Welless October 10, 1942, letter asks for Rockefellers support in
salvaging Its All True as both an artistic work and a political project and stresses
the political success of his radio broadcasts; Rockefellers distanced November 11,
1942, response praises the radio work as well but suggests that Welles subordinate
his artistic interests to national interests when it comes to Its All True (WilsonWelles Collection).
100. See Higham (Its All True, 93) and Benamou (Its All True as Document/
Event,123) for further discussion of this shift at the behest of Rockefeller.
101. This oce existed from 1941 to 1945.
102. The CIAA memo is dated April 22, 1942 (Welles Mss., box 17, folder 19, 5).
103. On February 28, 1942, Schaefer reassured Gordon Youngman that he doubted
the cost of the lm would go over a million dollars, but then, we never made the
deal predicated on limiting the cost to any set gure. After all, we must have a good
picture, and since the Government protects us up to 30 but not more than 300,000,
there is every incentive for us to limit the cost to 1,000,000 (Wilson-Welles).
104. Da Noite, Welles Mss., box 18, February 9, 1942.
105. Da Noite, February 9, 1942, Welles Mss. In contrast, Welless correspondence
with his attorney Arnold Weissberger paints a very dierent picture of his attempts
to avoid the draft by pleading his status as sole nancial support for his ex-wife,
Virginia, and daughter, Christopher.
106. Pettey, Rio project journals, April 2, 1942.
107. Benamou, Its All True as Document/Event, 127.
108. Ibid., 137.
109. CIAA Memo, Oce of Coordinator of Inter-American Aairs Motion
Picture Division, 22 April 1942 (Welles Mss., box 17, folder 19), 8.
110. Benamou, Its All True as Document/Event, 133.
111. Correspondence between Lynn Shores, Walter Daniels, and Reginald Armour
from March of 1942 indicates that the studio had lost enthusiasm for the project
at this point and was discussing various ways of restricting Welless supplies and
nancial resources (Wilson-Welles). See also Joseph McBride, What Ever Happened
to Orson Welles? (Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2006), 6979. McBride includes a
damning transcription of a phone conversation between Armour and Phil Reisman,
RKOs foreign manager, that indicates the antagonistic nature of the relationship
between the studio and Welles at this point.
112. Benamou, Its All True as Document/Event, 129.

NOTES TO PAGES
113. Ibid., 128.
114. Budget and salary statistics for Its All True are in box 17 of the Welles Mss.
See appendix 2 in Benamous Its All True: Orson Welless Pan-American Odyssey for
statistics regarding existing footage for Its All True, including type of lm, location,
and preservation status (31017).
115. On a six-month contract for the child actor, his name appears as Jesus
Vasques and he is promised a bonus in American dollars at the end of lming.
Welles Mss., box 17, folder 13.
116. Pettey, Rio project journals, March 29, 1942.
117. Frederick Othman, United Press, Welles Mss., box 17, folder 21, April 28, 1942.
118. Pettey, Rio project journals.
119. Othman, Welles Mss., April 28, 1942.
120. Petty, Rio project journals.
121. Qtd. in Petty, Rio project journals, April 2, 1942.
122. Cine Radio Journal, May 20, 1942.
123. Benamou, Its All True: Orson Welless Pan-American Odyssey, 286.
124. Hello Americans, Brazil Draft Radio Script, Welles Mss., box 10, 1942
(Music), 2.
125. Ibid., 2.
126. Ibid., March 6, 1942.
127. Ibid., Insert 12.
128. Ibid., 12
129. Ibid.
130. Ibid., 13.
131. Benamou still nds a sense of plurivocality in Welless dialogue with Carmen Miranda, but the multiplicity of Brazilian voices from the earlier drafts is lost
in the dialogue (Its All True: Orson Welless Pan-American Odyssey, 286).
132. Hello Americans, Brazil, 13.
133. Ibid., 14.
134. The parrot imagery recurs in each of the drafts, but the description of them as
so close you can touch them while eating lunch at a restaurant is refuted by Petteys
assertion, The subject of fty percent of the jokes in Rio is either a monkey or a
parrot but you could search the city for days and never nd one (Welles Mss., Rio
Journals, March 31, 1942).
135. Hello Americans, Brazil.
136. The image of the urban/pastoral binary once again connects to the exoticism of African American folk life, as Staneld notes (An Excursion into the Lower
Depths, 94).
137. Hello Americans, Brazil.
138. Ibid., 20.
139. This structure would appear again in the 1955 British television series Around
the World with Orson Welles.
140. Hello Americans, Brazil, 12.
141. Pettey, Rio project journals.
142. Ibid. April 2, 1942.
143. Ibid., May 5, 1942.

NOTES TO PAGES
144. Ibid.
145. Enas Viany, They Think It Is but It Is Not, Welles Mss., box 18, folder 11,
April 1942.
146. Carnaval: Treatment of the Film Itself.
147. Welles Mss., box 15, folder 19, 38.
148. Ibid., 38.
149. Ibid., 42.
Afterword: Wellesian LegaciesWhat, If Anything, Do Mel Gibson,
Stephen Colbert, and Steven Spielberg Have in Common?
1. The star director can be dened as a spokesperson for an overall cinematic
brand who creates box-oce successes through the mere association with his or her
name. In extreme cases, star directors can sell products that they do not themselves
direct but with which they are associated as producers.
2. The passion play is controversial enough to merit an ocial examination by
the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, who produced the Criteria for the
Evaluation of Dramatizations of the Passion. This document gives guidelines for
appropriate dramatization of the passion and specically rejects interpretations
that explicitly or implicitly seek to shift responsibility from human sin onto this
or that historical group, such as the Jews since they can only be said to obscure a
core gospel truth (Bishops Committee for Ecumenical and Interreligious Aairs.
National Conference of Catholic Bishops, 1988. U.S. Catholic Conference: www.
nccbuscc.org).
3. Gibsons next lm, Apocalypto (2006), had a domestic gross of only 15 million on
its opening weekend, despite widespread release. This seems meager compared with
The Passions opening weekend, which garnered more than 83 million. Perhaps more
signicantly, Apocalypto had a 40 million production budget but grossed only 50
million domestically, whereas The Passion grossed more than ten times its 30 million
production budget in domestic sales alone (Box Oce Mojo, www.boxocemojo.com).
4. Warren Buckland, Directed by Steven Spielberg: Poetics of the Contemporary
Hollywood Blockbuster (New York: Continuum, 2006), 23. Buckland ties eective
branding to six emotions outlined by Rolf Jensen that are essential to advertising
(adventure, love and friendship, care, self-identity, peace of mind, and beliefs and
convictions), all of which he nds in Spielbergs lms (23).
5. Ibid., 25.
6. Ibid., 26.
7. Ibid., 26.
8. Ibid., 224.
9. Even a directorial project as commercially and critically successful as Spielbergs
Schindlers List, for example, was criticized for its Americanization of the Holocaust and its commodication into [. . .] popular culture. Lester Friedman, Citizen
Spielberg (Chicago: U of Illinois P, 2006), 318.
10. As scholars have noted, Gibsons use of these languages was not so much
historically accurate as evocative of historical accuracy. The choice of Latin and the
use of Biblical quotations familiar to viewers gave the sense of a documentary rather
than interpretive version of the events represented. Brian Doyle, Conversation about
The Passion of the Christ (paper presented at Marymount University, Arlington, VA,

NOTES TO PAGES
April 2004.). In this sense, Gibsons lm ts within the fake documentary category
discussed later in this chapter.
11. Bruce Zuckerman gives a brief media genealogy of the controversy over the
Popes quote as reported on CNN.com, ABCnews.com, and the Catholic News
Service in Where Are the Flies? Where Is the Smoke? The Real and Super-Real in
Mel Gibsons The Passion. Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 23,
no. 3 (2005), 130.
12. Steven Leonard Jacobs, Jewish Ocialdom and The Passion of the Christ:
Who Said What and What Did They Say? Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of
Jewish Studies 23, no. 3 (2005), 116.
13. Adele Reinhartz, Jesus of Hollywood from D. W. Grith and Mel Gibson,
New Republic, March 8, 2004, 29. The National Conference of Catholic Bishops specically warns against this strategy of adapting the gospels in its 1988 document on
dramatizing the passion, saying, To attempt to utilize the four passion narratives
literally by picking one passage from one gospel and the next from another gospel,
and so forth, is to risk violating the integrity of the texts themselves (Criteria for
the Evaluation).
14. Reinhartz, Jesus of Hollywood, 29.
15. Kelly Denton-Borhaug, A Bloodthirsty Salvation: Behind the Popular Polarized Reaction to Gibsons The Passion. Journal of Religion and Film 9, no. 1 (April
2005), 2. http://unomaha.edu/jrf.
16. Ibid., 4.
17. Stuart D. Robertson, A View from the Pew on Gibsons Passion. Shofar: An
Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 23, no. 3 (2005), 109.
18. Ibid., 107.
19. Robertson cited the lm as evidence of the Gibsonian fascination with violence [in an attempt] to out-violate Braveheart (View from the Pew, 105). Reinhartz
similarly argues that the violence was not gospel-based but rather an expression
of Gibsons own imagination (Jesus of Hollywood, 29). Robert Gehl laments,
Gibsons Jesus does no more than preach a doctrine of state power and humiliating
punishment. Why Arent We Seeing this Now? Public Torture in The Passion of
the Christ and Fahrenheit 9/11, Nebula 1, no. 2 (September 2004), 40. http://www.
nobleworld.biz/journalhome.html.
20. Box Oce Mojo. http://www.boxocemojo.com (August 1, 2007).
21. Friedman, Citizen Spielberg, 64.
22. Ibid.
23. These two reactions to the violence are captured in the postings of Michael
R. and bacgems on IMDb. Michael R. praises Gibsons depiction of violence,
stressing, The movie is about the suering/passion of Jesus, and turning the camera
away would not have an impact on you. The movie shows what Jesus actually went
through for all of mankinds sins (according to Christianity). Mel Gibson did not
exagerate [sic] the violence or make it look like horror movie or Kill Bill violence. In
contrast, bacgems found the violence to be grossly exaggerated, arguing that it made
Christ seem like a large man-shaped aquarium full of blood. He was not purported
to have extraordinary powers of bleeding, was he? I thought I was seeing a movie
about the Prince of Peace, and it was just some guy being tortured at close range
(IMDb, accessed August 1, 2007).

NOTES TO PAGES
24. Denton-Borhaug, A Bloodthirsty Salvation, 67.
25. Ibid., 8.
26. James Moore, Mel Gibsons The Passion of the Christ: A Protestant Perspective,
Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 23, no. 3, (June 8, 2007) 102.
27. Friedman, Citizen Spielberg, 65.
28. Jacobs, Jewish Ocialdom and the Passion of the Christ, 115.
29. Moore, Mel Gibsons The Passion of the Christ: A Protestant Perspective,
104.
30. David Rooney, Passion Play Lands Mel atop Power List, Daily Variety Gotham (June 18, 2004), 4. http://www.variety.com.
31. According to David Rooney, the Forbes ranking is based on celebrity earnings
over the past 12 months in addition to popularity, Internet prole, media attention,
and magazine covers (Passion Play, 4). He cites the domestic box oce for The
Passion at 370 million (Passion Play, 4), which when added to international gross
produced 608.4 million in prots for the lm. Mel Sells, Hollywood Reporter, June
1820, 2004, 6. http://www.hollywoodreporter.com.
32. Steven Zeitchick, His Passion Is Showing, Variety, October 28, 2006, 6.
33. Gibsons Passion Gets an Evangelical Blessing, Christian Century, July 26,
2003, 14.
34. Ibid., 14.
35. Jacobs, Jewish Ocialdom and the Passion of the Christ, 119.
36. Ibid., 117.
37. Gibsons Passion Gets an Evangelical Blessing, 15.
38. Robertson, View from the Pew, 106.
39. Denton-Borhaug, Bloodthirsty Salvation, 5.
40. Jacobs, Jewish Ocialdom and the Passion of the Christ, 116.
41. Gibsons Passion Gets an Evangelical Blessing, 15.
42. Anthony Burke Smith traces the major inuences of Catholicism as being
images from the Stations of the Cross, Marian devotionalism, Baroque painting,
and the mysticism of [. . .] Anne Catherine Emmerich. Burke Smith additionally
places Gibson as the most recent in a long line of Catholic lmmakers (including John Ford, Frank Capra, and Martin Scorsese) who have inuenced American
culture. Hes an Auteur. Rev. Commonweal 132, no. 10 (May 20, 2005): 26 (2). For
further details of theological traditions represented by Gibsons lm, see the two
books reviewed by Burke Smith: Jesus and Mel Gibsons The Passion of the Christ:
The Films, the Gospels, and the Claims of History, ed. Kathleen Corley and Robert
Webb (New York: Continuum, 2004), and Mel Gibsons Passion and Philosophy:
The Cross, the Questions, the Controversy, ed. Jorge J. E. Gracia (Peru, IL: Open
Court, 2004).
43. Nicole Gull, Onward, Christian Marketer, Inc. (July 11, 2004).
44. Zeitchick, His Passion Is Showing, 6.
45. Gull, Onward, Christian Marketer.
46. Gibsons Anti-Semitic Outburst Shocks Jews, Christian Century (August
22, 2006), 11.
47. Ibid., 12.
48. Ibid., 12.

NOTES TO PAGES
49. Character Witness, Christian Century, September 5, 2006, 7.
50. More Duplicity from ADLs Foxman, New American, August 9, 2004, 8.
51. Friedman, Citizen Spielberg, 15859.
52. Qtd. in Friedman, Citizen Spielberg, 157.
53. Buckland, Directed by Steven Spielberg, 215.
54. Friedman, Citizen Spielberg, 155.
55. Buckland, Directed by Steven Spielberg, 216.
56. Ibid., 216.
57. Friedman, Citizen Spielberg, 157.
58. Friedman oers an anecdote of a colleague who proclaims himself antiSpielbergian, a description that Friedman observes he had never heard applied to
high-status directors like Welles (Citizen Spielberg, 2).
59. Friedman, Citizen Spielberg, 2.
60. Ibid., 3.
61. Box Oce Mojo.
62. Buckland, Directed by Steven Spielberg, 215.
63. Friedman, Citizen Spielberg, 158.
64. Qtd. in Buckland, Directed by Steven Spielberg, 215.
65. Ibid., 161.
66. Ibid., 159.
67. Welles is often portrayed as a magician performing tricks for his audience. Paul
Salmon quotes Simon Callow as rejecting formal dramatic analysis of the trailer for
Citizen Kane, saying it is neither Brechtian nor Pirandellian, but just a trick. Qtd.
in The People Will Think What I Tell Them to Think: Orson Welles and the Trailer
for Citizen Kane. Canadian Journal of Film Studies 15, no. 2 (fall 2006), 110. Welles
even opens F for Fake with this metaphor applied to himself as lmmaker.
68. Critics such as Edward Oxford have linked War of the Worlds ability to panic
the listeners to a culture of prewar fear, when unlikely invasions suddenly seemed
possible. Martians Invade the Airwaves in 1938, excerpted from Night of the
Martians, in American History Illustrated (October 1998), rpt. The 1930s, ed. Louise
I. Gerdes (San Diego: Greenhaven P, 2000), 20722.
69. Touch of Evils bloated Quinlan, oating downstream in garbage, condemned
by the sound of his own recorded voice crying guilty . . . guilty . . . oers an example
of this kind of failure to reconcile public and private selves, one that was important
enough for Welles to defend in his memo to Ed Muhl, in which the director begged
for this scene to remain, uncut, in the lm (Wilson-Welles Collection, box 5).
70. Robert Spadoni, The Seeing Ear: The Presence of Radio in Orson Welless
Heart of Darkness, in Conrad on Film, ed. Gene M. Moore (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997), 86.
71. Harry M. Geduld, Welles or Wells?A Matter of Adaptation, in Perspectives
on Orson Welles, ed. Morris Beja (New York: G. K. Hall, 1995), 269.
72. Catherine L. Benamou, The Artice of Realism and the Lure of the Real in
Orson Welless F for Fake and Other Treasures, eds. Alexandra Juhasz and Jesse
Lerner, F is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truths Undoing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 151.
73. Ibid., 152.

NOTES TO PAGES
74. Edward Oxford attributes the midprogram radio switching to a musical spot
on the popular Chase and Sanborn Hour that bored listeners into switching their
radio dial to Welless broadcast twelve minutes into the show (Martians Invade
the Airwaves, 211). Simon Callow attributes it to a break in the Edgar Bergen and
Charlie McCarthy Show. Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu (London: Jonathan
Cape, 1995), 401.
75. Benamou, The Artice of Realism, 153.
76. Ibid., 168.
77. Benamou explores the theoretical implications of this phrase as it applies to
Its All True fully in Its All True: Orson Welless Pan-American Odyssey (Berkeley:
U California P, 2007), 89.
78. Excerpts of Welless Don Quixote, Merchant of Venice, and other unnished
projects were screened at the Transnational Welles conference at Yale in November
2006, for example.
79. Benamou, Artice of Realism, 147.
80. Ibid., 154.
81. Qtd. in Benamou, Artice of Realism, 160. Bukatmans words originally appear in Persistence of Vision 7 (summer 1989).
82. H. R. Stoneback points out that truthiness appears in the 1824 Oxford
English Dictionary, at which point it simply meant truthfulness. Under KilimanjaroTruthiness at Late Night: Or Would Oprah Kick Hemingway Out of Her Book
Club, Hemingway Review 25, no. 2 (spring 2006), 126.
83. Sue Khodarahmi, Words of the Year, Communication World (March-April
2007), 1. http://www.iabc.com/cw. The Dialect Society provides this online denition
of the term: preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts
or facts known to be true and cites Colberts explanation of the concept: I dont
trust books. Theyre all fact, no heart. (American Dialect Society).
84. Khodarahmi, Words of the Year, 12.
85. To google is one contemporary method of negotiating collective truth by
searching for random public representations of the self, whether facts, opinions,
or ctions. But to google also indicates that truth itself has become increasingly
unstable and tenuous, subject to instantaneous negotiation and renegotiation, interpretation and reinterpretation, since googling depends on a constantly shifting
set of cyber allusions and cross-references.
86. Aaron McKain, Not Necessarily Not the News: Gatekeeping, Remediation,
and The Daily Show, Journal of American Culture 28, no. 4 (Dec 2005), 426.
87. Steve Gennaro, The Daily Show: The Face of American News in 2005, Kritikos
2 (April 2005): 67. http://www.gannet.acns.fsu.edu.
88. Ibid., 7.
89. Tad Friend, Is It Funny Yet? New Yorker, February 11, 2002.
90. McKain, Not Necessarily Not the News, 417.
91. Juhasz and Lerner, Introduction, 3.
92. Ibid., 28.
93. Ibid., 15.
94. Ibid., 5, emphasis added.
95. Ibid., 12.

NOTES TO PAGES
96. The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press reported that 21 percent
of viewers aged 1829 learnt most of their 2004 presidential campaign news primarily from The Daily Show and Saturday Night Live (qtd. in Gennaro, Daily Show,
5). The conjunction between election reality and entertainment was highlighted in
2008 by the creation of special editions of Saturday Night Live after each national
debate that both mirrored and mimicked the debates.
97. Juhasz and Lerner, Introduction, 13.
98. Television commentators compared the visuals of 9/11 to a Jerry Bruckheimer
movie, implying that the images unfolding before them came from the world of
entertainment, spectacular horror, rather than from daily life. The Onion, a satirical
print news source, featured the 9/11 headline, American Life Turns into Bad Jerry
Bruckheimer Movie (qtd. in David S. Cohen, Deeds, Not Words, Variety July 10,
2006, 3. Arts Module. ProQuest.
99. Stewarts career centers on an essential performance of himself. As explained
by interviewer Tad Friend, Stewart understands that he is not an actor but a performersomeone who can deliver a heightened version of himself (Is It Funny Yet?).
100. Stewart employs a masculinist comic style that made it dicult to incorporate
his emotional reaction to 9/11. His phone call to Stern, whose show targets male listeners, depicted his distress as a moment of feminine weakness due to menses, thus allowing a cathartic purge and denial of what was positioned as an emotional anomaly.
101. Tad Friend, Is It Funny Yet?
102. Tad Friend, Is It Funny Yet? Mayor Bloomberg appears to agree, responding to a 2007 terrorism scare in which F.B.I. agents arrested a retired cargo handler
with plans to blow up J.F.K. airport by saying, There are a lot of threats to you in
the world[. . . .] You cant sit there and worry about everything. Get a life (Michael
Powell, New York: Yours, Mine and Theirs, New York Times, June 10, 2007, sec. 4,
col. 1, 3. Lexis-Nexis).
103. Gennaro, Daily Show, 1.
104. Ibid., 9.
105. McKain, Not Necessarily Not the News, 416.
106. Ibid., 418, original emphasis.
107. Ibid., 425.
108. Ibid., 418.
109. Ibid., 419.
110. Ibid., 426.
111. Ibid., 427.
112. Ibid., 428.
113. David Vaina, Moving Backwards: Network News Losing Battle of Gravitas,
St. Louis Journalism Review (Dec. 2006/Jan. 2007), 21.
114. Michael Learmonth, CBS Targets Youth: Net to Simulcast Couric News on
Web, Daily Variety Gotham, 5. http://www.variety.com. As Deborah Potter remarks,
Courics new bosses are counting on her to build a bigger audience that includes
more women and younger viewers. The reason, simply put, is money. Breaking the
Mold: Katie Courics Shift to Solo Network News Anchor Represents a Milestone
for Womenand an Opportunity to Attract New Viewers. American Journalism
Review 28, no. 3 (June-July 2006), 64.

NOTES TO PAGES
115. William Powers, Brand Aid, National Journal (March 17, 2007), 54.
116. Gennaro, The Daily Show, 2. Stewart was even rumored to be competition
for Couric as a possible successor to Dan Rather on CBS (Vaina, Moving Backwards,15).
117. McKain, Not Necessarily Not the News, 428. McKains analysis is based on
his interpretation of Slavoj ieks The Sublime Object of Ideology.
118. Ibid., 420.
119. Ibid., 421.

1XQ[X^VaP_Wh
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Staneld, Peter. An Excursion into the Lower Depths: Hollywood, Urban Primitivism, and St. Louis Blues, 19291937. Cinema Journal 41, no. 2 (2002):
84108.
Stoneback, H. R. Under KilimanjaroTruthiness at Late Night: Or Would Oprah
Kick Hemingway Out of Her Book Club. Hemingway Review 25, no. 2 (spring
2006): 12327.
Tale of Two Cities. Bound radio script. July 25, 1938. Welles Manuscripts.
The Talk Shows. New York Times, August 14, 1938, sec. 9: 10.
Thompson, Daniella. Daniella Thompson on Brazil. http://daniellathompson.com
(accessed January 23, 2009).
Tomasulo, Frank. Narrate and Describe? Point of View and Narrative Voice in
Citizen Kanes Thatcher Sequence. Wide Angle: A Film Quarterly of Theory,
Criticism, and Practice 8 (1986): 4552.
Torgovnick, Marianna. Gone Primitive. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990.
Tucker, Robert G. New Macbeth Presented at Keiths: Harlem Version of Bards
Drama Proves Unusual. Indianapolis Star, August 26, 1936, 11.
Vaina, David. Moving Backwards: Network News Losing Battle of Gravitas. St.
Louis Journalism Review (December 2006January 2007), 1415, 21.
Viany, Enas. They Think It Is but It Is Not. April 1942. Welles Manuscripts, box
18, folder 11.
War of the Worlds. Directed by Steven Spielberg. Paramount, 2005.
Welles Manuscript Collection. Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington.
Welles, Orson. Letter to Diana Bourbon. October 10, 1939. Welles Manuscripts.
. Correspondence. Welles Manuscripts, boxes 14.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
. A Tale of Two Cities on Theatre of the Imagination [sound recording]. Santa
Monica, CA: Voyager Company, 1988.
Welles, Orson, and John Houseman. The Summing Up: The Directors of the Mercury Theatre Look Over Their First Year. New York Times, June 12, 1938, sec.
10: 12.
Welles Laments Wane of Theatre. New York Times, June 29, 1938, 12.
Williams, Linda Ruth. Critical Desire: Psychoanalysis and the Literary Subject.
London: Edward Arnold, 1995.
Wilson, Je. A New Kind of Radio Program. Orson Welles (Lady Esther). Wellesnet:
Radio, 8 pages. http://www.wellesnet.com (accessed August 1, 2005).
Wilson-Welles Collection. University of Michigan Special Collections, Ann Arbor.
Wolland, Marcus. Lost Eden: The Magnicent Welles. PBS DVD, 2004.
Wood, Brett. Orson Welles: A Bio-Bibliography. New York: Greenwood P, 1990.
Zeitchik, Steven. His Passion Is Showing. Variety, October 28, 2006, 6, 139.
iek, Slavoj. Four Discourses, Four Subjects. In Cogito and the Unconscious, ed.
iek, 74113. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1998.
Zuckerman, Bruce. Where Are the Flies? Where Is the Smoke? The Real and SuperReal in Mel Gibsons The Passion. Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish
Studies 23, no. 3 (2005): 12935.

8]STg
ABC This Week, 16667
ABCnews.com, 201n. 11
Adeus, Praa Onze (samba), 12435,
136, 196nn. 61, 64
Algiers: 1938 lm (Wanger), 84, 187n. 59;
1939 radio drama, 8, 70, 78, 8190, 91,
93, 97, 99, 100, 102, 104, 105, 106, 112,
187nn. 56, 59, 188nn. 65, 73, 74
Allen, Woody, 144
Amblin Entertainment. See Spielberg,
Steven
American Dialect Society, 161, 204n. 83
American script. See Citizen Kane
American Unitarian Association, 40
Amos n Andy, 69, 73, 183nn. 34, 185n.
21
Anderegg, Michael, 34, 44, 49, 61, 92,
174n. 2, 181nn. 6, 10, 182n. 33
Andrew, Dudley, 16, 22, 125, 175n. 24,
184n. 6
Angora, Gatinha, 118, 133
Anholt, Simon, 15, 23, 176n. 42
Anti-Defamation League (ADL), 151,
152
anti-Semitism: and Hollywood, 146, 149
50; and Mel Gibson, 42, 145, 15052;
and Welles, 4142, 54, 11516
Anzalda, Gloria, 194n. 25
AOL Time Warner, 162
Armour, Reginald, 198n. 111
Around the World with Orson Welles
(1955 television), 199n. 139
Arthur, Paul, 26, 175n. 29, 177n. 62
Athayde, Austregsilo de, 12021
Atkinson, Brooks, 77
auteur theory, 14, 10, 25, 27, 44, 4647,
59, 97, 129, 141, 143, 144, 148, 151, 173
nn. 67, 177n. 67, 203n. 58. See also
Welles, Orson, as auteur

Baer, Richard, 36, 63, 91, 107

Baraka, Amiri, 184n. 7
Barrymore, John, 35, 57, 58, 76
Barrymore, Lionel, 5758, 82
Bazin, Andr, 18
Benamou, Catherine, 10, 116, 118, 119, 121,
125, 126, 128, 130, 13132, 134, 158, 159,
160, 173nn. 4, 10, 179n. 107, 192nn. 13,
193nn. 15, 18, 194nn. 2324, 195nn.
3839, 46, 196n. 49, 197n. 94, 198nn.
95, 100, 199nn. 114, 131, 204n. 77
Benedict, Howard, 81
Benjamin, Walter, 159
Bernstein, Maurice, 23
Black Communist Party, 72, 73, 75
Bloom, Harold, 50, 52
Bloomberg, Mayor Michael, 205n. 102
Boardwell, David, 129
Bogdanovich, Peter, 178n. 97, 179n. 110
Bourbon, Diana, 82, 83, 84, 85, 8789,
179n. 113, 187n. 54. See also Ward
Wheelock, Inc.
branding practices, 1516, 19, 2628, 158,
16465, 176n. 42; and CBS, 2225,
2728; Christian, 41; co-branding, 22,
28, 161, 165; directorial, 14245, 152
53, 15556, 200n. 1; primal, 2226;
sensory 15. See also Campbell Soup;
Mercury Theatre; Wellesian brand
Brantlinger, Patrick, 92, 93, 95, 97, 1056,
108, 188n. 84, 191n. 119
Braveheart (1995), 148, 201n. 19
Brazil: and Welles, 10, 23, 10910, 113,
11718, 12021, 12628, 13033, 137
39, 195nn. 33, 39, 196n. 49, Figures 4,
6, 7, 11. See also Its All True
Breen, Joseph I., 106, 194n. 27. See also
Breen Commission
Breen Commission, 192n. 146

INDEX
Bright Lucifer (1933), 73, 185n. 23
Brown, John Mason, 71, 75
Bruckheimer, Jerry, 205n. 98
Buckland, Warren 143, 144, 156, 200n. 4
Bukatman, Scott, 160
Burke Smith, Anthony 152, 202n. 42
Burroughs, Eric, 73, 185n. 24
Burroughs, Norris, 185n. 24
Callow, Simon, 74, 75, 203n. 67, 204n. 74
Campbell Playhouse, 2527, 40, 47, 57
58, 63, 65, 81, 83, 89; and tension over
Welles contract with RKO, 8283. See
also First Person Singular: Mercury
Theatre on the Air
Campbell Soup: and branding strategies,
15, 2225, 28, 176n. 42; sponsorship of
Welles by, 34, 39, 40, 4445, 5658,
62, 64, 81, 84, 183n. 3
Carnival celebration: Welless representation of, 112, 115, 116, 11718, 119,
125, 12729, 132, 13536, 139, 194n. 25,
195n. 38. See also Its All True
Carousel. See Liliom
Carradine, Keith, 160
Carringer, Robert, 129, 178n. 97, 180n.
1, 197n. 90
Carter, Jack, 8, 7677, 91, 9495, 96, 186n.
39, Figure 3
Catholic Charities and Publicities Bureau, 39, 82
Catholic News Service, 201n. 11
CBS Nightly News, 167, 206n. 116
CBS radio network, 7, 34, 39, 183n. 3;
marketing of Welles, 2225, 2728,
48, 57, 82, 83, 84, 137
Cear, Brazil, 119, 140, Figure 9
Ceiling Unlimited (1942 radio script),
174n. 6
Chappell, Ernest, 25, 40, 83, 87, 89, 158
Chase and Sanborn Hour, 204n. 74
Christmas Carol, A, 50; (1938 radio), 7,
48, 5758; (1939 radio), 58, 82
Cinema Nova, 195n. 35
Citizen Kane (1941), 2, 56, 13, 16, 26,
3238, 39, 63, 66, 159, 183n. 61, 203n.
67; American script, 9, 178n. 84;

author controversy and, 20, 27, 3437,

62, 64, 65, 178n. 97; Cold War and,
27; rst-person singular and, 18, 21,
23, 4344, 4950; and Its All True,
115; News on the March scene, 33,
160, 162, 163; Rosebud, role of, 5, 12,
1819, 22, 25, 33; social realism and,
18; Thompson, role of, 5, 33, 129, 158,
173n. 4; Thatcher sequence, 33, 38. See
also Mankiewicz, Herman J.
CNN, 161, 162, 165
CNN.com, 201n.11
Colbert, Stephen, 4, 161, 16465, 168. See
also Colbert Report, The
Colbert Report, The, 12, 144, 161, 16365,
168
Collins, Ray, 89
Collins, Wilkie, 50
Colman, Ronald, 51, 66
Condential Report. See Mr. Arkadin
Conrad, Joseph, 92, 95, 97, 98, 1056, 108,
191n. 119; and modernism, 47, 68, 90,
93. See also Heart of Darkness
Coppola, Francis Ford, 90, 189n. 90
Coulouris, George, 95
Coulton, Kingsley, 57
Count of Monte Cristo, The (1939 radio),
83
Couric, Katie, 167, 205n. 114
Cradle Will Rock, The (1937), 34
Crandall, George, 72
Cronenberg, David, 4
Crook, Tim, 174n. 13, 192n. 7
Crossre, 167
Cullen, Countee, 184n. 17
Cut above the Rest, A (1957), 19697n. 68
da Silva, Manuel (Preto) Pereira, 119
Daily Show, The, 12, 144, 16162, 16368,
205n. 96. See also Stewart, Jon
Daniels, Walter, 198n. 111
Dark Rapture (1938, Denis), 91
David Coppereld (1935, Cukor), 51, 61,
64, 66
de Souza, Jernimo Andr, 119
DeBona, Guerric, 30, 31, 57, 61, 68, 93, 95,
106, 184n. 8, 190n. 110

INDEX
Del Rio, Dolores, 65, 82, 117, 133, 183n.
66, 197n. 80
DeMille, Cecil B., 41, 143, 146
Denning, Michael, 16, 27
Dennison, Stephanie, 34, 112, 175nn.
26, 28
Denton-Borhaug, Kelly, 147, 148
Deschanel, Caleb, 147
Dirio da Noite, 118, 12021
Dickens, Charles, 7, 29, 4651, 53, 54,
55, 57, 61, 64, 66, 67, 151, 181nn. 3, 13.
See also Christmas Carol, A; David
Coppereld; Oliver Twist; Pickwick
Papers; Tale of Two Cities, A
Dobson, James. See Focus on the Family
documentary expression, 111, 192nn. 6, 7.
See also Its All True, as documentary
ction; truthiness
Don Quixote: Welles project, 13, 204n.
78
Donahoe, Eddie, 107
Doyle, Brian, 200n. 10
Dr. Faustus, The Tragical History of
(1937), 18889n. 88
Dracula (1938 radio), 16, 19, 48
Drake, Herb; 23, 81; and Citizen Kane, 35;
and Heart of Darkness, 91, 19091n.
115; and Its All True, 117, 118, 129,
193n. 9, 194nn. 29, 32, 195n. 41, 197n.
80
DreamWorks. See Spielberg, Steven
Dunn, Irene, 180n. 127
Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy
Show, 204n. 74
Eisenstein, Sergei, 5051
Eliot, T. S., Use of Poetry and Criticism,
The, 6970, 106; and primitivism, 75,
76, 78, 80, 83
Elizabethan theater, 25
Ellington, Duke, 194n. 24
Ellis, Maurice, 76, 186n. 39
Emperor Jones, The (1920), 72, 73, 74, 75
Ensink, Titus, 17, 81
expressionism, 72, 73, 74, 84, 87, 92, 93,
98, 99, 100, 101, 112, 113, 193n. 13. See
also modernism

F for Fake (1973), 12, 19, 15960, 163, 167,

203n. 67
fake documentary, 160, 16263, 164,
187n. 49, 201n. 10. See also Its All
True; truthiness
fake news, 12, 109, 11112, 123, 141, 142,
14445, 158, 16068. See also truthiness
fascism, 26, 72, 84, 94, 168; and Heart
of Darkness, 9293, 94, 95, 97, 1014,
108, 184n.8, 189n. 89; and Its All True
113, 138, 193n. 18; and Welles, 26, 68,
98, 112, 173n. 12, 189n. 89
Federal Theatre Project, 47. See also
Dr. Faustus, The Tragical History of;
Macbeth (1936 voodoo); Negro Theatre Unit
Fields, W. C., 46, 48, 51, 64, 66
First Person Singular: Mercury Theatre
on the Air (1938 radio), 57, 14, 1619,
20, 21, 2326, 3031, 47, 56, 57, 61,
90, 153, 159, 174n. 13, 176n. 35. See
also Campbell Playhouse; Mercury
Theatre
Fitzsimmons, Lorna, 27
Five Kings (1939), 66, 81
Focus on the Family, 150, 152
Fortaleza, Brazil, 12021, 132, 196n. 49
Foster, Norman, 116, 197n. 80. See also
Journey into Fear
Foxman, Abraham, 151, 152
France, Richard, 74, 77, 185n. 18
Frederickson, George. See romantic racialism
Freud, Sigmund, 70, 77, 78, 84, 88
Freyre, Gilbert, 140
Friedman, Lester, 148, 149, 153, 154, 156,
200n. 9, 203n. 58
Friend, Tad, 162, 165, 205n. 99
Gabbard, Krin, 1, 4
Gallagher, Catherine, 50
Geduld, Harry M., 158, 192n. 7, 193n. 12
Gehl, Robert, 201n. 23
Gennaro, Steve, 162, 165, 167
Gibson, Mel, 11, 14243, 144, 145, 146,
14953, 15556, 160, 200n. 10, 201n.

INDEX
Gibson, Mel (continued)
19, 202n. 42; Apocalypto (2006), 200n.
3; Braveheart (1995), 148, 201n. 19. See
also anti-Semitism; Passion of the
Christ, The; star director
Goddard, Paulette, 85, 188n. 65
Goldfarb, Phyllis, 127
Gomery, Douglas, 193n. 10
Good Neighbor policy, 26, 109, 110, 117
Grande Othelo. See Prata, Sebastiao
Bernardes de Souza
Great Gatsby, The, 129
Grith, D. W, 146
griot, 56, 1920, 68, 173nn. 6, 7
Group Theater, 28
Gull, Nicole, 151
Gunning, Tom, 187n. 51
Haggard, Ted, 150
Haiti, 72, 73, 74, 75
Hamlet, 42
Hammond, Percy, 186n. 31
Hanlon, Patrick, 2325, 176n. 42. See also
branding practices, primal
Hansen, Miriam Bratu, 122, 123, 173n.
9, 184n. 16
Haran, Shifra, 140, 180n. 136
Harlem, New York, 71, 76, 77
Hayes, Helen, 39
Hays oce, 41
Hearst, William Randolph, 3435, 37,
163
Heart of Darkness: Conrad novel, 29, 90,
9293, 97, 9899, 105, 108, 129, 188n.
84; I = Eye concept, 3031, 44, 46, 97,
99100, 1023, 154, 178n. 77, 190n.
108, Figure 1; introduction/prologue,
17, 3132, 39, 96, 99, 100, 123, 126; RKO
project 6, 810, 13, 16, 26, 3032, 56,
61, 64, 68, 85, 90108, 112, 113, 115, 117,
153, 154, 168, 187n. 59, 189nn. 98100,
190nn. 108, 110, 19091n. 115, 191n.
132, 192n. 6, Figure 2; Welles radio
broadcasts, 19, 29, 70, 78, 90, 91, 92,
93, 100, 189n. 91
Hello Americans, 25, 117, 120, 123, 128,
130, 13439, 164

Herrmann, Bernard, 27
Heylin, Clinton, 178n. 97
Higham, Charles, 194n. 24, 195n. 46,
197n. 80, 198n. 100
Hildreth, Jeremy, 15, 23, 176n. 42
History of Violence, A (2005, Cronenberg), 4
Hodel, Don. See Focus on the Family
Hollywood: and Christianity, 14553, 155,
180n. 127, 201nn. 11, 23, 202n. 42; classic cinema form and production, 10,
13, 20, 2831, 68, 110, 111, 113, 12122,
12527, 129, 141, 173n. 9, 181n. 3; and
the Holocaust, 142, 145, 146, 14951,
152, 15556, 200n. 9; and jungle lms,
91, 93, 132, 189n. 94; marketing of
Welles, 19, 41, 117, 190n. 111, 193n. 10;
racism and, 194n. 32; realism and,
143, 144, 14647, 165; relationship
of studios to Welles, 13, 26, 27, 44,
57, 59, 1067, 117, 12223, 129, 168;
theater in, 182n. 41; Welless move to,
46, 60, 66, 81
Hollywood Community Chest, 63
Holocaust, the. See under Hollywood
hooks, bell, 187n. 48
Hope, Bob, 26, 177n. 62
Hopper, Hedda, 37, 129
Horse Eats Hat (1936), 123
Houseman, John, 22, 28, 182n. 37; break
with Welles, 27, 47, 5859, 82; collaboration with Welles, 9, 24, 25, 48, 60,
6364, 65, 83, 181n. 4, 182n. 45, 187n.
54, 18889n. 88, 19091n. 115; and
Liliom, 39, 179n. 113; and Macbeth,
72, 74, 76, 186nn. 31, 38; and Native
Son, 36, 179n. 101. See also Mercury
Theatre; Negro Theatre Unit
Howard, Sidney, 18889n. 88
Hughes, Howard, 160
Hurston, Zora Neale, 184n. 17
infotainment, 119, 162, 167
Internet Movie Database (IMDb), 147,
201n. 23
Intolerance (1916, D. W. Grith), 146
Irving, Cliord, 160

INDEX
Its All True: Bonito sequence, 132, 194n.
23, 197n. 80; Brazilian government
and, 113, 114, 118, 120, 128, 131, 140,
194n. 27; Carnaval sequence, 12130,
140, 194n. 23, 196n. 62; as documentary ction, 17, 33, 111, 113, 117, 126,
128, 138, 140, 177n. 62, 178n. 86, 188n.
71, 192n. 6; jangadeiros section, 110,
11621, 125, 126, 131, 132, 139, 140,
192n. 2, 194n. 23, 195n. 38; and Life
of Christ project, 39; lost lm footage, 10, 110, 173n. 10, 192n. 3; and Pan
American identity, 10910, 112, 117,
12325, 129, 131, 138; Peru in, 116; prologue, 110111, 125, 127, 140; as RKO
project, 910, 12, 13, 15, 19, 26, 56, 65,
108, 10941, 168, 173n. 4, 179n. 107;
samba in, 116, 12130; scripts, variant, 11317, 140, 180n. 136, 19394n.
18, 194n. 24, 195n. 42; (1993, Krohn,
Meisel), 197n. 75. See also Brazil, and
Welles; Meira, Manoel Olimpio; Prata,
Sebastiao Bernardes de Souza
Jacar. See Meira, Manoel Olimpio
Jacobs, Steven Leonard, 149
Jameson, Frederic: schizophrenic I,
93, 95
Jane Eyre (1944, Stevenson), 64, 65; (1938
radio), 64, 65
Jangada Club, 120
Jesus of Nazareth (1977, Zerelli), 146
Jiminy Cricket, 111, Figure 5
Johnson, Erskine, 129
Journalistic Code of Ethics, 162
Journey into Fear (1943, Foster and
Welles), 13, 197n. 80
Juhasz, Alexandra, 160, 162, 163, 187n. 49
Julius Caesar (1937), 39, 56, 60, 92, 173n.
12, 18889n. 88, 19091n. 115; (1938
radio), 111, 173n. 12
Kael, Pauline, 178n. 97
Kastrup, Mathilde, 120
Kilborn, Craig, 164
King of Kings (1927, DeMille), 41, 146;
(1961, Ray), 146

Knight, Arthur, 75
Knubel, F. H. (United Lutheran Church),
4142
Krohn, Bill, 197n. 75
Lady Esther radio series, 58, Figure 5
Langford, Frances, 82
Larry King Live, 167
Last Temptation of Christ, The (1988,
Scorsese), 146
Leaming, Barbara, 76
Lerner, Jesse, 160, 162, 163, 187n. 49.
Life of Christ (RKO project), 6, 13, 16, 38
44, 66, 145, 150, 152, 179n. 110, 180n. 133
Liliom (1938 radio), 3940, 82, 179nn.
11213
Lima, Raimundo Correia, 119
Lime, Harry, 180n. 133
Lindstrom, Martin, 15, 176n. 42, 347
Lockheed-Vega, 15, 174n. 6, 176n. 42
Lorde, Audre, 186n. 43
Lost Eden: The Magnicent Welles (Marcus Wolland), 159
Luce, Henry, 27
Lyons, Leonard, 39, 190n. 115
Macbeth, 186n. 43; (1936 voodoo), 78,
56, 7078, 83, 87, 91, 93, 101, 112, 118,
184n. 9, 185nn. 18, 22, 2426, 30, 186nn.
31, 35, 39, 41; 189n. 89; (1948) 65, 74
MacLeish, Archibald. See Panic
Magnicent Ambersons, The (1942), 13,
18, 26, 27, 64, 117; (1939 radio), 64
Maher, Bill, 165
Manheim, Leonard, 50
Mankiewicz, Herman J., 27, 3437, 62, 65,
179n. 101, 19091n. 115
Mantle, Burns, 25
March of Time series, 47, 111, 134; in
Citizen Kane, 33
McBride, Joseph, 178n. 97, 179n. 100,
183n. 52, 198n. 111
McKain, Aaron, 161, 166, 167
McLeod, Elizabeth, 183n. 3
Meira, Manoel Olimpio (pseud. Jacar),
113, 118, 11921, 124, 131, 139, 140, 193n.
15, 195nn. 41, 46, 196n. 49

INDEX
melodrama, 113, 14849, 165
Mendes, Sam, 144
Mercer, Kobena, 70, 184n. 8
Merchant of Venice, The: Welles and,
204n. 78
Mercury Theatre, 3, 14, 15, 21, 43, 5859,
60, 141, 192n. 6, 197n. 80; branding
and, 2224, 2728, 48, 176n. 31; Hollywood and, 27, 82, 91, 12932, 182n.41,
18990n. 100, 194n. 24; on radio, 9,
19, 63, 64, 78, 79, 92, 183n. 3. See also
First-Person Singular: Mercury Theatre on the Air; Cradle Will Rock, The;
Dr. Faustus; Horse Eats Hat; Macbeth
(1936); Native Son
Merriam-Webster, 161
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), 51, 60,
61, 64, 66
Mexican Melodrama (Welles screenplay), 65, 92, 178n. 77, 183n. 67, 189n.
89
Michael Gard screenplay, 11516, 193n.
18. See also Its All True
Milch, David, 160, 161
Miller, Arthur, 15
Miranda, Carmen, 134, 135, 137, 140,
199n. 131
Moby DickRehearsed (1955), 159
modernism, 18, 47, 92, 93, 122, 123, 129,
156, 160, 175n. 19; populist, 69, 75,
173n. 9, 184nn. 68, 16; and primitivism, 89, 12, 29, 65, 6881, 83, 92, 93,
95, 98103, 105, 106, 108, 109, 112,
113, 116, 118, 125, 138, 188n. 65, 189n.
94, 193n. 13
Moore, James, 148, 150
Moorehead, Agnes, 78
Morrison, James, 175n. 26, 178n. 85
Mr. Arkadin (1955), 12, 19, 20
Muhl, Ed, 203n. 69
Naremore, James, 20, 24, 30, 61, 64, 73,
173n. 3, 174n. 10, 175n. 19, 176nn. 3132,
40, 178n. 77, 183n. 47, 185n. 23, 189n.
89, 193n. 18
National Conference of Catholic Bishops,
200n. 2, 201n. 13

National Council of Teachers of English

(NCTE), 59
Native Son (1941), 7, 36, 179nn. 100101
NBC radio, 34
Negro Theatre Unit (of Federal Theatre Project), 72, 184n. 17. See also
Macbeth (1936 voodoo); Houseman, John
Neves, Berilo, 121
New Life Church, 150
Newmarket, 151
NewsCorp, 162
newsiness, 16263. See also truthiness
9/11, 11, 142, 144, 154, 156, 164, 165, 205nn.
98, 100
Northern Baptist Convention, 17980n.
119
Novais, Guiomar, 140
OBrien, Richard, 34
Oce of the Coordinator of Inter-American Aairs (CIAA). See under U.S.
government
Oliver Twist: (1938 radio), 7, 1617, 29, 47,
5257, 182nn. 24, 29; (Dickens novel),
5355; musical adaptation, 53
Olivier, Laurence, 76
ONeill, Eugene, 71, 73, 74, 75. See also
Emperor Jones, The
Onion, The, 205n. 98
Orsons Shadow (2008, Pendleton), 159
Othman, Frederick, 132, 133
Ousmane, Sembne, 173n. 7
Oxford, Edward, 203n. 68, 204n. 74
Panic (1935), 112, 181n. 4
Paramount Pictures, 66, 173n. 10, 192n. 3
Parlo, Dita, 93, 94
Parsons, Louella, 35, 37
Passion of the Christ, The (2004, Gibson), 11, 42, 14243, 14553, 155, 156,
165, 168, 200nn. 3, 10, 201nn. 19, 23,
202nn. 31, 42
passion play, tradition of, 143, 200n. 2,
201n. 13
Pp Le Moko (1937, Devivier), 84, 88. See
also Algiers (1938)

INDEX
Pettey, Tom, 126, 129, 131, 13233, 193n.
9, 194nn. 29, 32, 195nn. 41, 46, 197n.
80, 199n. 134
Pew Research Center for the People and
the Press, 205n. 96
Pickford, Mary, 60
Pickwick Papers: (1938 radio), 57, 64,
182n.23; (Dickens novel), 50; RKO
project, 67, 13, 46, 4748, 6467
Plata, Jess Vsquez, 132, 199n. 115
pornography, 148, 150
postmodern cultural critique, 2, 4, 12,
147, 156, 161
Potter, Deborah, 205n. 114
Power, Tyrone, 130
Prata, Sebastiao Bernardes de Souza
(pseud. Grande Othelo), 115, 125, 127,
19697n. 68, Figure 10
primitivism. See under modernism
Pugh, Rev. Wiliam Barrow, 4041
Rachel (1916, Grimk), 184n. 14
radio broadcast: cultural role of, 4, 69,
158, 17475n. 13; inuence on Welles,
4, 1213, 1618, 24, 2931, 52, 5860,
81, 11112, 122, 127, 138, 157, 187n. 59,
190n. 110; truthiness and, 158, 174n.
13
realism. See under Hollywood
Reichenbach, Franois, 160
Reinhartz, Adele, 146, 201n. 19
Reisman, Phil, 198n. 111
Ricks American Bar (lm script), 113
15
RKO (Radio-Keith-Orpheum Studio),
24, 9, 10, 12, 1415, 17, 2021, 2630,
32, 46, 52, 56, 65, 91, 92, 98, 106, 110,
111, 112, 113, 183n. 47, 194nn. 24, 27;
budget issues and, 9495, 107, 121,
13132, 139,18990n. 100, 192nn. 147
48, 198n. 103, 199n. 114; Jacars death
and, 195n. 46; marketing of Welles,
12223, 12528, 13032; Welless
contract with, 58, 35, 37, 48, 51, 58,
6065, 8182, 97, 198n. 111. See also
Schaefer, George
Robertson, Stuart, 147, 201n. 19

Rockefeller, Nelson, 109, 130, 194n. 27,

198nn. 99100
Roemer, Michael, 176n. 36, 189n. 90
Rogers, Buddy, 60
romantic racialism 8, 72, 97, 106, 108,
109
Rooney, David, 202n. 31
Rosenbaum, Jonathan, 20, 176n. 32, 182n.
29, 189n. 89, 195n. 46
Rosten, Norman, 174n. 6.
Rudy Vallee Show, 35, 58, 182n. 33
Salmon, Paul, 203n. 67
Saturday Night Live: presidential politics and, 205n. 96; Weekend Update,
12, 13
Saudades da Amlia, 12425, 136,
196nn. 61, 62
Sayao, Bidu, 140
Scarborough, L. R. (Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary), 41
Schaefer, George, 35, 3738, 40, 44, 64,
94, 107, 130, 140, 179n. 107, 198n. 103.
See also RKO
Scholes, Robert, 181n. 15
Scorsese, Martin, 143, 202n. 42. See also
Last Temptation of Christ, The
Scott, Ridley, 144
Screen Writers Guild, 36
Selznick, David O., 60, 65
serial narratives 7, 25, 4649, 113, 138
Seventeen (1938 radio), 64
Shadow, The (radio series), 8, 38, 56, 60,
182n. 29; White God episode, 60,
70, 7881, 88, 91, 93, 103, 105, 106
Shakespeare, William, 1, 60, 61, 71, 72, 75,
7778, 111, 151, 185n. 22, 186n. 41
Shaw, Lisa, 34, 112, 175nn. 26, 28
Sheen, Msgr. Fulton, 4143, 180n. 127
Shores, Lynn, 198n. 111
Simon, William, 33, 192nn. 67
Simon Wiesenthal Center, 150
Sketches of Hayti (1827, Harvey), 185n.
18
Smiler with a Knife, The (screenplay), 92,
112, 18990n. 100
Smith, Grahame, 46, 47, 181nn. 3, 13

INDEX
Smith, Wendy, 185n. 26
Sollors, Werner, 70, 184n. 7. See also
modernism, populist
Spadoni, Robert, 16, 29, 3031, 99, 158,
187n. 59, 189n. 89, 190n. 110, 191nn.
118, 136, 193n. 11
Spielberg, Steven, 1, 11, 14344, 155, 160,
203n. 58; lms of, 155, 200n. 9; Holocaust lm and, 15556, 200n. 9. See
also star director; War of the Worlds
(2005)
Stam, Robert, 194n. 25, 195n. 35
Staneld, Peter, 85, 87, 116, 185n. 22, 199n.
136. See also urban primitivism
star director, 1, 34, 6, 1011, 14243, 151,
153, 200n. 1; Mel Gibson as, 145, 148,
150, 152, 160; Steven Spielberg as, 155,
160, 200n. 4; Welles as, 18, 45, 4647,
57, 59, 63, 65, 180n. 137
Stephanopoulos, George, 166
Stern, Howard, 165, 205n. 100
Stewart, James (Jimmy), 62
Stewart, Jon, 164, 165, 166, 167, 205nn.
99100, 206n. 116. See also Daily
Show, The
Stoneback, H. R., 204n. 82
Swiss Family Robinson (1940, Ludwig),
107
Tale of Two Cities, A: (1938 radio), 7, 16,
19, 29, 47, 4954, 56, 57, 67; (1935, Conway), 51, 66; (Dickens novel), 5052,
182n. 20
Tarkington, Booth. See Magnificent
Ambersons, The
Ternan, Ellen, 50
This Is My Best, 90
Thomas, Edna, 76, 77, Figure 3
Thompson, Daniella, 196n. 64
Thompson, Kristin, 129
Thomson, Virgil, 186n. 38
Today Show, The, 167
Tomasulo, Frank, 17, 22, 33, 38, 175n. 26,
176n. 35
Too Much Johnson (1938), 66
Torgovnick, Marianna, 72, 84, 18788n.
62, 188n. 74

Touch of Evil (1958), 203n. 69

Treasure Island (1938 radio), 48
truthiness, 45, 1012, 157, 15969; presidential politics and, 204nn. 8283, 85,
205n. 96. See also Colbert, Stephen
Tucker, George (Protestant Episcopal
Church), 41
Tucker, Robert G., 77
Unnamed Mexican Story, 65
urban primitivism, 11617
U.S. government, 15, 113, 139, 140; Good
Neighbor policy, 26, 109, 110, 117; and
Office of the Coordinator of InterAmerican Affairs (CIAA), 13032,
198nn. 99, 1012
Vargas, President Getlio, 119, 125, 131,
140
Vasques, Jesus. See Plata, Jess Vsquez
vernacular modernism. See modernism,
populist
Viacom, 162
Viany, Enas, 13940
Vidor, King, 60
Vivendi Universal, 162
Walt Disney Company, The, 152, 162
War of the Worlds: (1938 radio), 4, 10,
1112, 17, 21, 22, 2425, 26, 34, 35,
49, 52, 57, 59, 61, 81, 11112, 123, 142,
14445, 15354, 15561, 163, 164, 166,
16768, 174n 13, 193n. 11, 203n. 68;
(H. G. Wells novel), 57, 15354, 156;
(2005, Steven Spielberg), 11, 142, 144
45, 15357, 168
Ward Wheelock, Inc., 28, 39, 82, 83,
18384n. 3. See also Bourbon, Diana;
Campbell Soup
Way to Santiago, The. See Mexican Melodrama
Weintraub, Jerry, 152
Weissberger, Arnold, 3436, 6263, 107,
183n. 52, 198n. 105
Welles, Christopher, 62, 198n. 105
Welles, Orson: as actor, 57, 58, 61, 76,
95, 180n. 136, 190n. 111; adaptation

INDEX
of classics by, 68, 12, 1819, 2930,
38, 39, 43, 4648, 57, 5961, 6367,
75, 81, 111, 151, 153, 192n. 6; and African American dialect, 71, 185n. 22;
and American identity, 2930, 43,
8487, 99, 108, 11517, 13637; as auteur 14, 10, 14, 4648, 56, 59, 97,
203n. 58; blackface and, 7677, 89;
cinematic legacy of, 11, 107, 14145,
157, 164, 16869; correspondence with
Christian denominations, 4044, 66,
17980n. 119; fact/ction and, 912,
1719, 22, 29, 34, 38, 65, 66, 108, 109,
11113, 115, 12021, 125, 126, 128, 141,
15761, 174n. 13; nances of, 6264,
107; rst-person narrative style, 57,
11, 12, 1623, 26, 2830, 3234, 38,
4344, 46, 4850, 57, 59, 61, 65, 6667,
86, 90, 97, 99, 108, 112, 113, 13941,
15354, 159, 164, 174n. 13, 176n. 36,
177n. 58; jazz and, 30, 85, 98, 99, 116,
12324, 132, 135, 194n. 24; metatheater, and 181n. 15; military draft and,
62, 131, 183n. 52; Oedipal narratives
of, 77, 8081, 8391, 9799, 1045;
postmodern aesthetic, 23,1822,
2728, 32, 91, 11011, 116, 12223, 125,
132, 157, 160, 181n. 6, 19091n. 115;

racial tourism and, 7677, 89, 125, 133,

187n. 48; rhetorical style of, 56, 8, 10,
1719, 28, 100, 12223, 176n. 40, 178n.
72, 197n. 90; samba and, 116, 12130,
13437, 140
Welles, Virginia, 62, 71, 90, 184n. 9, 198n.
105
Wellesian brand, 34, 10, 1415, 1820,
2228, 32, 34, 38, 4345, 133, 139, 142,
144, 157, 192n. 2; and classic literature,
4647, 60, 6667; and Mercury Theatre, 176n. 31; reexivity in, 122, 12527,
138, 141, 168; voice as logo, 1516, 17, 23,
31, 38, 57, 77, 84, 89, 126, 143
Wells, H. G. See War of the Worlds, novel
White, Hayden, 156, 161
White God, The. See Shadow, The
Williams, Linda Ruth, 21, 109, 148
Wilson, Je, 111
Wilson, Richard, 197n. 75
Youngman, Gordon, 198n. 103
YouTube, 2, 141, 161
Zerelli, Franco, 146
iek, Slavoj, 17, 175n. 27, 176n. 35, 177n.
58, 180n. 133
Zuckerman, Bruce, 147, 201n. 1

Marguerite H. Rippy is an associate professor of literature at Marymount

University in Arlington, Virginia, where she teaches twentieth-century
literature with a focus on multicultural literature and performance studies.
She has published articles on lm and drama, addressing topics ranging
from the representation of race and sexuality in cinema to adaptations of
Shakespeare on lm and television. Her lm reviews have appeared in the
Chronicle of Higher Education.

FILM / MEDIA STUDIES

Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects both unearths little-known
material and places some familiar works in a fresh context. This is an important contribution to the study of Orson Welles, a figure who continues to
occupy a large place in any consideration of American culture.
Michael Anderegg, editor of Inventing Vietnam:
The War in Film and Television
Marguerite H. Rippy provides the first in-depth examination of early film
and radio projects shelved by RKO or by Welles himself. While previous
studies of Welles largely fall into the categories of biography or modernist
film studies, this book extends the understanding of Welles via postmodern narrative theory and performance analysis, weaving his work into the
cultural and commercial background of its production.By identifying the
RKO years as a critical moment in performance history, Rippy synthesizes
scholarship that until now has been scattered among film studies, narrative
theory, feminist critique, American studies, and biography.
Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects traces the impact of legendary director Orson Welles on contemporary mass media entertainment
and suggests that, ironically, we can see Welless performance genealogy
most clearly in his unfinished RKO projects.
Marguerite H. Rippy is an associate professor in the Department of Literature and Languages at Marymount University in Arlington, Virginia. She
has published several articles on film and drama, addressing topics ranging
from the representation of race and sexuality in cinema to adaptations of
Shakespeare on film and television.
southern illinois university press
1915 university press drive
mail code 6806
carbondale, il 62901
www.siu.edu/~siupress
Cover image adapted from a photograph provided courtesy of
The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana
Printed in the United States of America

isbn 0-8093-2912-3
isbn 978-0-8093-2912-0